Dr. Karen Cummings is a new arrival to the physics faculty of University of Waterloo. She arrived at the University this fall via Southern Connecticut State University, where for the past decade she taught physics and specialized in the academic sub-discipline of Physics Education Research. Over the course of her career, Cummings has worked to foster the use of evidence- based instructional practices through curriculum development, assessment, and professional development for educators at all levels. Her research has led to fresh insights into what makes physics accessible to students at the University level. Said Cummings, “Most physicists go to conferences where they talk about physics; I go to conferences where they talk about how you teach physics more successfully — what people are doing in different places, and what they're learning by doing these different things.”
Physics Education Research is a field that emerged over the course of the past fifty years, in response to the changing nature of the physics classroom, as well as the changing profile of the average physics student. Whereas a half-century ago, physics was a necessary skill primarily for scientists and engineers, today’s physics education needs to prepare students for a broader range of careers. Said Cummings,
“It used to be okay for physics courses to be the kind of course that only some people could make it through, but now society has shifted, and jobs have shifted in ways where all kinds of people need to be able to learn successfully in physics courses.”
The contemporary physics classroom needed to change from “gatekeeper” to “gateway” — and that shift has required evidence-based educational reforms.
Cummings did not always know she wanted to go into physics education research. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Albany in experimental condensed matter physics. During her Ph.D., Cummings worked in an accelerator lab and studied the hydrogen diffusion in glass for application in conservation and preservation of historic stained-glass windows. Said Cummings, “I loved being in the accelerator lab… the drone of the vacuum pumps and working late at night. The project also had this great humanistic, artistic side to it that I loved.” She especially prized the cross-disciplinary nature of the work and sees cross-disciplinary research as an ongoing theme in her career. “My research tends to be more cross-disciplinary than some, especially between science and other disciplines,” Cummings elaborated. “It's not so unusual for a physicist to collaborate with a chemist, but the kind of work I've done has had me collaborating with people sometimes even outside scientific fields, so that makes it very interesting work.”
After her Ph.D., Cummings found work in the growing field of physics education reform, and the changing nature of the scientific classroom fascinated her even more than the accelerator lab. Prior to joining the faculty at Southern Connecticut State University, Cummings coordinated a large introductory physics course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, using a “studio” or “workshop”-style classroom. This course emphasized hands-on, active engagement, as opposed to more traditional, passive educational methods such as lectures. Sometimes referred to as “flipped” courses, this style of physics education emphasizes the lab experience and attempts to give students a sense of what it is like to actually do science.
In order to effectively implement the new style of instruction, Cummings spent many hours training and re-training graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants. She used evidence-based models for professional development of educators, employing data to look at what worked both for students and teachers. Said Cummings, “The thing I do that is most unusual in physics departments is I use data on my students to help figure out how to structure the course… I make a measure of what's going on, like any scientist would do, then look at that data and ask what the data tells me about how I should structure the course. The courses are often large and involve more than just me, so the question becomes: What do I ask the teaching assistants to do? How do the laboratories get structured? A lot of things go into it.”
At Southern Connecticut State University, Cummings further developed her models for assessing physics education, encouraging other physics faculty to assess learning in their courses and use that information to inform curricular discussions. She taught professional development workshops and authored more than 25 journal articles on the subject of physics education. She also embraced her teaching responsibilities, particularly her love of teaching introductory courses. Said Cummings,
“I think the first physics courses are the most important undergraduate courses we teach. They should set the tone, and foundation, for what is to follow.”
In her new role at the University of Waterloo, Cummings is excited to join a faculty that cares deeply about physics education. Said Cummings, “In a lot of big universities like this, you often find the faculty really focused on the research enterprise, and the education side is something they sort of do because they need to, but in the physics department at Waterloo, it's really true that the educational enterprise is very important to the department, and a lot of resources go into it both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, making the system work well for the students.”
Cummings' arrival has impacted the ongoing discussion at Waterloo around introductory courses for physics majors. She’s interested in a shift away from lecture-based introductory courses, and towards studio-based classes. She’s also working collaboratively to think about undergraduate laboratories so that “students come out of those courses with an appreciation of how truly exciting and challenging and fun it can be to engage in experimental science.” The projects she works on will be data-driven, with the goal of strengthening students’ experimental backgrounds, in addition to theoretical knowledge. Said Cummings,
“A lab can be the very best place to learn physics.”
