[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] One of the greatest weaknesses of physics education research is the paucity of research on graduate education. While there are a growing number of investigations of graduate student degree progress and admissions, there are very few investigations of learning at the graduate level. Additionally, existing studies of learning in physics graduate programs frequently focus on content knowledge rather than professional skills such as problem solving. Given that over 90% of physics Ph.D. graduates report solving technical problems regularly in the workplace, we sought to develop an assessment to measure how well graduate programs are training students to solve problems. Using a framework that characterizes expert-like problem-solving skills as a set of decisions to be made, we developed and validated such an assessment in graduate quantum mechanics (QM) following recently developed design frameworks for measuring problem solving and best practices for assessment validation. We collected validity evidence through think-aloud interviews with practicing physicists and physics graduate students, as well as written solutions provided by physics graduate and undergraduate students. The assessment shows strong potential in differentiating novice and expert problem solving in QM and showed reliability in repeated testing with similar populations. These results show the promise of measuring expert decision making in graduate QM and provide baseline measurements for future educational interventions to more effectively teach these skills.

Undergraduate physics and astronomy students are expected to engage with scientific literature as they begin their research careers, yet reading comprehension skills are rarely explicitly taught in major courses. We seek to determine the efficacy of a reading assignment designed to improve undergraduate astronomy (or related) majors’ perceived ability to engage with research literature by using accessible summaries of current research written by experts in the field. During the 2022–2023 academic year, faculty members from six institutions incorporated reading assignments using accessible summaries from Astrobites into their undergraduate astronomy major courses, surveyed their students before and after the activities, and participated in follow-up interviews with our research team. Quantitative and qualitative survey data from 52 students show that students’ perceptions of their abilities to understand jargon and identify the main takeaways of a paper significantly improved with the use of the tested assignment template. Additionally, students reported increased confidence in their abilities within astronomy after exposure to these assignments, and instructors having valued a ready-to-use resource for incorporating reading comprehension into their pedagogy. This exploratory case study, using Astrobites-based assignments, suggests that incorporating current research into the undergraduate classroom through accessible literature summaries may increase students’ confidence and ability to engage with research literature, thereby assisting in their preparation for participation in research careers.

Investigating students’ thinking in classroom tasks, particularly in science and engineering, is essential for improving educational practices and advancing student learning. In this context, the notion of Ways of Thinking (WoT) has gained traction in STEM education, offering a framework to explore how students approach and solve interdisciplinary problems. Building on our earlier studies and contributing to ongoing discussions on WoT frameworks, this paper introduces a new WoT framework—Ways of Thinking in Engineering Design-based Physics (WoT4EDP). WoT4EDP integrates five key elements—design, science, mathematics, metacognitive reflection, and computational thinking—within an undergraduate introductory physics laboratory. This novel framework highlights how these interconnected elements foster deeper learning and holistic problem solving in ED-based projects. A key takeaway is that this framework serves as a practical tool for educators and researchers to design, implement, and analyze interdisciplinary STEM activities in physics classrooms. We describe the development of WoT4EDP, situate it within undergraduate STEM education, and characterize its components in detail. Additionally, we compare WoT4EDP with two contemporary frameworks—Dalal et al. (2021) and English (2023)—to glean insights that enhance its application and promote interdisciplinary thinking. This paper is the first of a two-part series. In the upcoming second part, we will demonstrate the application of the WoT4EDP framework, showcasing how it can be used to analyze student thinking in real-world, ED-based physics projects.

We conducted two studies to investigate the extent to which brief, spaced, mastery practice on skills relevant to introductory physics affects student performance. The first study investigated the effect of practice of “specific” physics skills, each one relevant to only one or a few items on the course exam. This study employed a quasiexperimental design with 766 students assigned to “intervention” or “control” conditions by lecture section sharing common exams. Results of the first study indicate significant improvement in the performance for only some of the exam items relevant to the specific skills practiced. We also observed between-section performance differences on other exam items not relevant to training, which may be due to specific prior quiz items from individual instructors. The second study investigated the effect of practice on the “general” skill of algebra relevant to introductory physics, a skill which was relevant to most of the exam items. This study employed a similar quasiexperimental design with 363 students assigned to treatment or control conditions, and we also administered a reliable pre- and post-test assessment of the algebra skills that was iteratively developed for this project. Results from the second study indicate that 75% of students had high accuracy on the algebra pretest. Students in the control condition who scored low on the pretest gained about 0.7 standard deviations on the post-test, presumably from engagement with the course alone, and students in the algebra practice condition had statistically similar gains, indicating no observed effect of algebra practice on algebra pre- to post-test gains. In contrast, we find some potential evidence that the algebra practice improved final exam performance for students with high pretest scores and did not benefit students with low pretest scores, although this result is inconclusive: the point estimate of the effect size was 0.24 for high pretest scoring students, but the 95% confidence interval [$-0.01$, 0.48] slightly overlapped with zero. Further, we find a statistically significant positive effect of algebra practice on exam items that have higher algebraic complexity and no effect for items with low complexity. One possible explanation for the added benefit of algebra practice for high-scoring students is fluency in algebra skills may have improved. Overall, our observations provide some evidence that spaced, mastery practice is beneficial for exam performance for specific and general skills, and that students who are better prepared in algebra may be especially benefitting from mastery practice in relevant algebra skills in terms of improved final exam performance.

Electricity and magnetism are fundamentally interconnected, as represented by the symmetry in Maxwell’s equations. Much of the research on Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws has focused on their application in calculating electric or magnetic fields. However, there remains a significant gap in the literature in exploring these laws in a broader context—particularly in understanding electric flux and magnetic circulation as distinct yet related concepts through the lens of the superposition principle. This study will fill this gap by examining students’ comprehension of electric flux and magnetic circulation. It focuses on their role in Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws beyond their typical use for computing other physical quantities. The study involved 322 engineering students completing a course on electricity and magnetism. The students were given two open-ended questionnaires of parallel problems: half answered questions addressing the electricity context, and the other half responded to questions addressing magnetism. Our phenomenographic analysis revealed significant conceptual confusion between electric field and electric flux, as well as between magnetic field and magnetic circulation, which affected their ability to apply the superposition principle. Additionally, some students incorrectly assigned physical reality to Gaussian surfaces and Amperian loops, further hindering their understanding of the superposition principle due to a blocking effect. We identify several factors that may contribute to these difficulties and suggest implications for teaching to address the conceptual difficulties identified in this study.

Students and educators often face time constraints, making it essential to develop interventions that are both easy to implement and have a substantial impact on learning and performance. One promising strategy is retrieval practice, particularly in the context of physics education, where many students struggle with basic knowledge. Prior research has shown that retrieval practice improves self-explanation and problem-solving performance, yet many students avoid it, even when resources are provided. To address this, we introduced a mandatory retrieval test with a minimum benchmark of 50% to encourage greater engagement with retrieval practice. The primary aim of this study was to explore students’ experiences with the test and its impact on their use of retrieval practice. A secondary aim was to examine whether increased retrieval practice effort correlated with improved performance on factual, conceptual, and problem-solving exams. Interviews with 13 students revealed that about half crammed for the test, while the other half spaced their practice throughout the semester. Several students noted that the test motivated them to both memorize and understand the principles, with no complaints about the mandatory test. Of the 463 students, 179 achieved a perfect score, suggesting substantial engagement. Effect sizes on factual, conceptual, and problem-solving performance tests ranged from negligible to large, indicating substantial potential benefits with minimal risk. In conclusion, the mandatory retrieval test is an effective, low-effort intervention for educators, promoting greater student adoption of retrieval practice and yielding both qualitative and quantitative evidence of enhanced learning and performance.

Reform documents advocate for innovative pedagogical strategies to enhance student learning. A key innovation is the integration of science and engineering practices through engineering design (ED)-based physics laboratory tasks, where students tackle engineering design problems by applying physics principles. While this approach has its benefits, research shows that students do not always effectively apply scientific concepts, but instead rely on trial-and-error approaches, and end up gadgeteering their way to a solution. This leads to what is commonly referred to as the design-science gap—that students do not always consciously apply science concepts while solving a design problem. However, as obvious as the notion of a gap may appear, there seems to exist no consensus on the definitions of design and science, further complicating the understanding of this gap. This qualitative study addresses the notion of the design-science gap by examining student groups’ discussions and written lab reports from a multiweek ED-based undergraduate introductory physics laboratory task. Building on our earlier studies, we developed and employed a nuanced, multilayered coding scheme inspired by the Gioia Framework to characterize design thinking and science thinking. We discuss how student groups engage in various aspects of design and how they apply physics concepts and principles to solve the problem. In the process, we demonstrate the interconnectedness of students’ design thinking and science thinking. We advocate for the usage of the term design-science connection as opposed to design-science gap to deepen both design and science thinking. Our findings offer valuable insights for educators in design-based science education.

Video instruction has been widely studied and is generally considered as effective as live instruction for teaching scientific concepts and procedures. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of prerecorded videos for teaching more challenging content. This study conducted a controlled experiment on over 300 high school students to compare the effectiveness of live instruction versus recorded video in teaching physics problem solving, a representative example of challenging content. Our results indicate that for simpler problems, there is no significant difference in student learning outcomes between live and video instruction, corroborating previous research. However, as problem complexity increases, live instruction significantly outperforms video instruction, potentially highlighting the importance of real-time adaptability, engagement, and sustained attention in face-to-face settings. We found a negative correlation between the effectiveness of video instruction and the difficulty level of the content. This study is the first to empirically investigate the use of video instruction for complex problem solving, making a significant contribution to the current body of literature. Additionally, the findings offer practical insights for school administrators or department heads, suggesting that while video instruction can effectively substitute for live teaching in simpler scenarios, live instruction remains crucial for more complex material, impacting decisions related to human resource allocation and instructional planning.

This study uses an initial attitudinal survey and a subsequent follow-up survey to assess which qualities are correlated with the persistence of women in physics. The initial survey was given to participants at the Conference for Undergraduate Women and Gender Minorities in Physics, and the follow-up survey was given years later, after they graduated; 478 matched surveys were used in this work. Using these surveys, we study how attitudes correlate with retention. First, we examine whether affective factors, mainly situated in identity theory, have any clear correlation with persistence in physics. Then, we study individual questions of the survey, such as a student’s interest in research specifically, to determine more fine-grained correlations with retention. Both of these were examined using analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with post hoc Tukey tests. From studying the overarching factors, we find that respondents who remained in physics after completing their bachelor’s degree reported higher interest than respondents who left physics at earlier points, with a medium effect size. We also find small evidence of associations between sense of belonging and correlation; respondents who leave physics before obtaining a bachelor’s degree tend to have a higher sense of belonging than other groups, while respondents who stay in physics until graduating, then leave for another science, technology, engineering, and mathematics field tend to have a lower sense of belonging. This association, however, shows a small effect size and should be examined more carefully to draw definitive conclusions. We find that identity, perceived recognition, performance competence, success mindset, and sense of community show no significant correlation with long-term persistence. When examining individual questions, we find that people who remain in physics tend to have a higher interest specifically in research, as well as career aspirations of going to graduate school and becoming a professor in physics.

Belonging in a discipline or department is an important aspect of people’s persistence in that discipline or department, especially for undergraduate students. Previous research has shown that increasing student feelings of belonging in a department benefits all students and is even more valuable for women, racialized people, and other underrepresented groups. However, helping students to develop feelings of belonging can be difficult and complex. This article presents data from a larger, primarily qualitative case study that was conducted at a research-based university in Canada. It examines how a group of faculty, staff, and students worked toward building community and cultivating belonging in their physics department. The aspects of this process that the professor and student participants experienced, and the challenges and rewards encountered, are described and explained here. Some of the strategies that professor participants undertook were relatively easily accomplished using what we describe here as a “classical” paradigm; the analogy is to the traditional physics culture. One example of a strategy employed under the classical paradigm is hosting a mentoring program for physics majors. Other strategies were quite challenging for many professor participants and required a paradigm shift toward more progressive views, which, following the analogy, we call a “quantum” paradigm. An example is believing and behaving as though students with B grades belong and can succeed in physics. We suggest that the paradigm shift from classical (traditional thinking) to quantum (progressive) is an important barrier that members of the physics community must recognize and overcome to fully address student participation and experiences in physics, although some changes were still possible without making the paradigm shift. The study found a new difference between feeling welcome and feeling a sense of belonging among students, as well as a similar difference among faculty members. We present possible steps that physics faculty and staff may consider along the road to recruitment and retention in physics, which are notable for departments and instructors interested in improving student outcomes, departmental sustainability, and equity, diversity, and inclusion.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Instructors teaching upper-division quantum mechanics have had two primary options when it comes to textbook choice and thus curriculum sequence: starting with wave functions and the Schrödinger equation, referred to as “wave functions-first;” and starting with discrete spin-$1/2$ systems and Dirac notation, known as “spins-first” courses. Given the very different structures of these courses, particularly as it pertains to the notations and formalisms both emphasized and used, it begs the question as to whether and to what extent students in these different courses conceptualize symbolic expressions in Dirac and wave function notations differently. To investigate this, online surveys were administered to students in spins-first courses at six institutions and in wave functions-first courses at four institutions. As a follow-up to a prior study focused on the results from the spins-first courses, network analysis and community detection techniques were used to compare the level of conceptual similarity between expressions as viewed by the students in both curricula. Conceptual interpretations of individual expressions in both Dirac and wave function notations were also directly compared between the two populations. The primary difference observed between the two populations appears to lie in the way they interpret Dirac bras and kets: spins-first students were found to more strongly connect these expressions to vectorlike interpretations, while wave functions-first students were found to interpret them as more wave functionlike. This suggests that the choice of text and/or curricular style should be informed by the interpretation that best matches the goals of the instructor.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Quantum information science and technology is a growing field. Programs like Quantum Flagship in the EU and the National Quantum Initiative Act in the U.S. have called for science education and science education research to provide efforts and competencies for preparing the workforce and the next generations of quantum experts and promoting quantum literacy. The second quantum revolution is similar to the Newtonian one in that it has the potential to question worldviews in our society. We present our approach to design a teaching module for secondary school students that aims to value the cultural scope of the second quantum revolution. The model of educational reconstruction was used as a theoretical reference to reconstruct content for educational and cultural purposes. Renn’s elaborated historical analysis of knowledge evolution provided the criteria for characterizing the cultural scope in content reconstruction. The module has been iteratively refined following a design-based approach involving back-and-forth dynamics between educational hypotheses and empirical results. The process started in 2018, and the module was refined through 5 rounds of implementation in extracurricular courses with secondary school students (for almost 130 students). The main finding underscores the importance of finding a balance between a process of simplification or elementarization of the content and its enrichment to foster learners to develop a deep understanding of quantum technologies, their conceptual intricacies, and their cultural scope.

Problem solving is considered an essential ability for becoming an expert in physics, and individualized feedback on the structure of problem-solving processes is a key component to support students in developing this ability. Problem-solving processes consist of multiple elements whose order forms the sequential structure of these processes. Specific sequential structures can be expected to better reflect expert problem solving and more likely lead to successful solutions. However, this sequential structure often receives limited attention in assessments, thereby neglecting possibly valuable diagnostic information that could be used for individualized feedback. Consequently, a deeper understanding of the sequential structure of students’ written physics problem-solving approaches could leverage novel potentials for physics instruction and feedback provision. This study therefore aimed to examine how the sequential structure of written problem-solving approaches differs between high- and low-performing problem solvers as well as to what extent specific sequential elements are predictive of problem-solving performance. To achieve this, we employed methods from process mining and sequence analysis research. Our findings revealed that low-performing problem solvers often lack structure in their problem-solving approaches, contrasting with notably more systematic approaches of the high-performing problem solvers. Additionally, the order in which assumptions and conceptual aspects are addressed in a problem-solving approach seems to be an indicator of problem-solving performance. The findings of this study enhance our understanding of physics problem-solving processes and highlight opportunities for improving instruction and feedback for physics problem solving by considering the sequential structure of students’ physics problem-solving approaches.

Asian(American) physics students lack ample representation in physics identity studies and in the broader science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) sociological literature. This may be due to their perceived overrepresentation, the “model minority” myth, or their treatment as monolithic. These misconceptions obscure the diversity among Asian(American) students. How do these students understand and form their physics identity? Through in-person interviews, we have gathered data on the experiences of self-identifying Asian or Asian American undergraduate physics majors. For our analysis, we draw from previous physics identity research and use the critical physics identity framework developed in recent studies on Black physicists’ identities. We present results from the ideational resource code and emergent codes generated from the data, such as Transnational Context and Asianization. Our findings suggest that some participants found other personal and social identities beyond their race or ethnicity to be salient to their physics identity and experience. Our results also indicate that the perceptions of Asian(Americans) as overrepresented in STEM may also serve to hide the less privileged identities that some of the participants hold and thereby the challenges that come with those less visible identities.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) experienced a resurgence in popularity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this work, we studied participants in an astrobiology MOOC offered on Coursera since April 2019. Using a modified version of the Science Motivation Questionnaire II, we examined the primary motivational factors of the participants, how those factors related to demographics and course performance, and how participants in our MOOC compared to those in a general astronomy MOOC as well as traditional undergraduate students. Participants in the astrobiology MOOC were more highly motivated when compared to the general astronomy MOOC across all five motivational factors we surveyed: intrinsic, career, grade, self-determination, and self-efficacy. Compared to the undergraduate population, astrobiology MOOC participants reported higher motivations in all the factors except for career and grade. We found that demographics had some impact on these results, with older participants reporting lower career and grade motivations and female participants having generally higher motivations compared to males. Despite this, male participants and those older than 40 were more likely to complete the course. As the astrobiology MOOC was initially offered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we also looked at the impact the pandemic had on these results. The demographics of participants changed significantly, with the percentage of participants under the age of 30 and the percentage of those identifying as full-time students doubling compared to prepandemic. The motivations of participants also changed, with participants showing more career and grade motivation since the pandemic. Interestingly, the increase in younger and more full-time student participants has continued even with the return of in-person learning. This suggests that the pandemic introduced MOOCs to a new population of learners who have continued to utilize them in the years since.

In this study, we explore the use of analogies with classical physics in introductory quantum physics (QP) teaching. This work is part of a larger project in which a learning sequence covering three introductory QP topics was designed, tested, and evaluated in collaboration with high school teachers and physics education researchers. Based on the theoretical foundations of guided inquiry-based learning and collaborative learning, three lessons covering the topics of photoelectric effect, wave-particle duality, and tunneling were developed. For each lesson, a digital inquiry learning space (ILS) was created which implemented a digital laboratory for performing experiments with specific interactive assignments and multimedia material. For this study, each ILS was adapted into two distinct versions, to be applied with students in two experimental conditions: one in which analogies with classical physics were present in the lessons, and one in which such analogies were avoided. Six classes of Dutch upper-secondary students ($n=89$) were assigned to one of the conditions and followed the respective version of the learning sequence during a period of approximately 6 weeks. Students’ answers to ILS activities were logged and used for a qualitative analysis. Once the learning sequence was finished, students took a post-test covering all three QP topics and scores were compared between the analogy and no analogy conditions. After correcting for students’ overall performance in physics, we found that students in the no analogy condition scored significantly higher on the post-test than the analogy condition for two out of the three QP topics (wave-particle duality and tunneling). An accompanying qualitative analysis suggests that the use of analogies with classical physics might hinder QP learning, as some students manifested difficulties in grasping the limitations of the classical analogies that were used in the materials.