Joss Ives, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Andrew Boudreaux, Western Washington University

The fourth Foundations and Frontiers in Physics Education Research: Puget Sound conference welcomed more than 40 PER practitioners and consumers to the North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center for four days this past June. This residential conference was modeled after the ongoing FFPER meetings in Bar Harbor, ME. Five plenary talks, three workshops and two poster sessions provided the jump off points for discussions that developed during unstructured time, where people participated in activities such as afternoon hikes through the surrounding rainforest and evening star-gazing. Most participants came from British Columbia, California, Oregon, and Washington state, with a few travelers from as far away as Hawaii and the east coast of the U.S. The group included graduate students, high school teachers, post-docs, and faculty from 2-yr and 4-yr colleges and universities, as well as one undergraduate student.

To encourage presenters to share their most current ideas, the conference is “off the record.” However, this edition of the APS Fed newsletter shares highlights from the featured presentations. The list below summarizes all of the plenary talks and workshops that were presented at the conference. The set of short articles that follows describes some of these in more detail.

• Joel Corbo (University of Colorado, Boulder) discussed the need for cultural change in higher education and how to think about one's work in terms of principles and commitments.
• Leslie Atkins Elliott (Boise State University) showed that when students draw on the rich contexts of their lives as they develop and critique scientific ideas, transfer to their out-of-class lives is much more prevalent.
• Elizabeth Gire (Oregon State University) shared her work studying the development of physics sensemaking practices in a new, sophomore-level mechanics course that helps physics majors refine and routinize physics sensemaking strategies.
• Enrique Suarez (University of Washington, Seattle) explored the idea that learners and scientists leverage a wide variety of communicative resources when sharing their observations and reasoning, such as gestures and multiple languages. Constraining what counts as acceptable communication to academic English can leave out a host of productive communicative resources and create inequitable learning environments, especially for emerging bilingual students.
• Ben Van Dusen (California State University, Chico) encouraged our field to modernize its data collection and analysis methods to generate less biased and more generalizable findings.
• James Day (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Paula Heron (University of Washington, Seattle) and Jayson Nissen (California State University, Chico) facilitated a workshop in which participants explored the use and misuse of statistics in science, with a focus on statistical significance versus educational significance.
• Jared Stang and Joss Ives (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) facilitated a workshop exploring the rationales, implementation choices, and best-practices related to adding a group-phase to an exam.
• Regina Barber-DeGraaff and Robin Kodner (Western Washington University) facilitated a workshop, titled "Cultural awareness of self in STEM," in which participants explored issues of identity and privilege.

We look forward to welcoming returning participants and newcomers to the next offering of FFPERPS, planned for June 2020.

Joss Ives is a senior instructor at the University of British Columbia. He has participated in all four of the FFPER-Puget Sound conferences offered to date, but this was the first time he helped with the organizing process.

Andrew Boudreaux is an associate professor at Western Washington University. He has participated in and helped organize all four of the FFPER-Puget Sound conferences offered to date.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.