Dr. Beth Thacker

 Research Interests:

Dr. Beth Thacker is a Professor of Physics at Texas Tech University. She has developed a laboratory-based, inquiry-based curriculum (INQ) taught using Socratic questioning pedagogy and has done significant work investigating students’ qualitative and quantitative understanding of physics concepts in courses taught by traditional and non-traditional methods. She is presently has students working on the development and assessment of an upper level undergraduate Quantum Computing course, assessing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of learning assistants, assessing students’ thinking skills across pedagogies, identity and metacognition and graduate student understanding of symmetry and conservation laws in classical mechanics. She was a Principal Investigator on a large-scale assessment project at TTU that demonstrated the effectiveness of the use of evidence-based materials in the introductory undergraduate physics courses. 

 Selected Publications:

Beth Thacker, “Inquiry-based experimental physics: Twenty years of an evidence-based, laboratory-based physics course for algebra-based physics students,” Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 19, 020116 (2023). https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.020116 

Fatema Al-Salmani, Jordan Johnson, and Beth Thacker, “Assessing thinking skills in free-response exam problems: Pandemic online and in-person, Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 19, 010131 (2023). https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.010131 

Fatema Al-Samani and Beth Thacker, “Rubric for assessing thinking skills in Free-response exam problems,” Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 17, 010135 (2021).  https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.17.010135 

Beth Thacker, Stephanie Hart, Kyle Wipfli and Jianlan Wang, “The Development of Free Response Questions to Assess Learning Assistants’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge,” Res. Sci. Educ., (2024) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-024-10203-3 

T. Kushimo and B. Thacker, "Investigating Students' Strengths and Difficulties in Quantum Computing," 2023 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE), Bellevue, WA, USA, 2023, pp. 33-39, doi: 10.1109/QCE57702.2023.20322 (2023) https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/qce/2023/432303a033/1SuQrwoZwFW 

Get in touch at beth.thacker@ttu.edu