We have previously described the reformed introductory physics course, collaborative learning through active sense-making in physics (CLASP), for bioscience students at a large public research one university (Original University) and presented evidence that the course was more successful and more equitable than the course it replaced by several measures. Now we compare the original success of CLASP with an implementation at a second institution. We find that the original results hold at another institution despite some changes to the original curriculum and a somewhat different student population. We find that students who take CLASP are (1) less likely to drop, (2) less likely to fail, and (3) do as well in later coursework when compared to students who took the courses that CLASP replaced, even if that coursework is not similarly reformed. We find the above items to be independently true for historically marginalized students and remarkably, also find that (4) marginalized students who take CLASP are more likely to graduate from a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics field. We use a course deficit model perspective to examine these results and discuss some of the factors that may have contributed to this success. We argue that higher education has the tools needed to significantly increase equity and improve student success and retention.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] The ability to relate physical concepts and phenomena to multiple mathematical representations—and to move fluidly between these representations—is a critical outcome expected of physics instruction. In upper-division quantum mechanics, students must work with multiple symbolic notations, including some that they have not previously encountered. Thus, developing the ability to generate and translate expressions in these notations is of great importance, and the extent to which students can relate these expressions to physical quantities and phenomena is crucial to understand. To investigate student understanding of the expressions used in these notations and the ways they relate, clinical think-aloud interviews were conducted with students enrolled in an upper-division quantum mechanics course. Analysis of these interviews used the symbolic forms framework to determine the ways that participants interpret and reason about these expressions. Multiple symbolic forms—internalized connections between symbolic templates and their conceptual interpretations—were identified in both Dirac and wave function notations, suggesting that students develop an understanding of expressions for probability both in terms of their constituent pieces and as larger composite expressions.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Research-based multiple-choice questions implemented in class with peer instruction have been shown to be an effective tool for improving students’ engagement and learning outcomes. Moreover, multiple-choice questions that are carefully sequenced to build on each other can be particularly helpful for students to develop a systematic understanding of concepts pertaining to a theme. Here, we discuss the development, validation, and implementation of a multiple-choice question sequence (MQS) on the topic of quantum measurement in the context of wave functions in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. This MQS was developed using students’ common difficulties with quantum measurements as a guide and was implemented in a junior-/senior-level quantum mechanics course at a large research university in the U.S. We compare student performance on assessment tasks focusing on quantum measurement before and after the implementation of the MQS and discuss how different difficulties were reduced and how to further improve students’ conceptual understanding of quantum measurement in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.

In physics education research, instructors and researchers often use research-based assessments (RBAs) to assess students’ skills and knowledge. In this paper, we support the development of a mechanics cognitive diagnostic to test and implement effective and equitable pedagogies for physics instruction. Adaptive assessments using cognitive diagnostic models provide significant advantages over fixed-length RBAs commonly used in physics education research. As part of a broader project to develop a cognitive diagnostic assessment for introductory mechanics within an evidence-centered design framework, we identified and tested the student models of four skills that cross content areas in introductory physics: apply vectors, conceptual relationships, algebra, and visualizations. We developed the student models in three steps. First, we based the model on learning objectives from instructors. Second, we coded the items on RBAs using the student models. Finally, we then tested and refined this coding using a common cognitive diagnostic model, the deterministic inputs, noisy “and” gate model. The data included 19 889 students who completed either the Force Concept Inventory, Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation, or Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey on the LASSO platform. The results indicated a good to adequate fit for the student models with high accuracies for classifying students with many of the skills. The items from these three RBAs do not cover all of the skills in enough detail, however, they will form a useful initial item bank for the development of the mechanics cognitive diagnostic.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Quantum mechanics is an integral course for physics students. An understanding of quantum concepts is imperative for enrollment in physics graduate programs, participating in research within physics fields, and employment with companies developing quantum technologies. This study analyzes 188 U.S. research-intensive institutions’ course catalogs to determine the role and extent of quantum mechanics in their undergraduate physics programs. All of the institutions required one course on quantum concepts, 92% required two courses, and half required three. Among institutions with complete class data ($n=56$), the quantum curriculum was analyzed using course syllabi. The mean number of classroom hours spent on quantum concepts was 63.5 h with a standard deviation of 28.1 h. The most commonly taught themes in the quantum curriculum were the equation and three-dimensional quantum mechanics. However, the Stern-Gerlach experiment was only included in 28% of the course outlines. Despite current efforts to promote a spin-first approach, this study found the traditional position-first approaches were still more common as they were used by 73.7% of instructors.

Response to the continuing call to integrate scientific inquiry activities into high school education has taken different forms varying in student ownership, physical setting, time span, and mentoring resources. Important issues are how students perceive central dimensions of their experience, and the extent to which the inquiry framework design serves to promote a sense of growth in the participants. The current research followed a group of 34 high school physics students who participated in the out-of-school Research Physics program over a 3-year period (2016–2019), gradually progressing from inquiry-oriented lab activities to an extended inquiry project under the guidance of teacher-mentors, within an instructional design of cognitive apprenticeship. The research focused on a set of 15 inquiry components, some directly related to experimental practices such as formulating inquiry questions, preparing and performing experiments, data processing using technological tools, others related to the scientific culture of presenting oral and written inquiry reports, and finally abilities of teamwork and self-regulation. Data regarding students’ perceptions of three aspects—Experience, Difficulty, and Development with respect to the inquiry components, were collected at the end of each year, using self-report questionnaires. The analysis of longitudinal trends revealed several inquiry components for which significant changes occurred in the perceptions of the three aspects, which can be mainly related to the program design. The research hypothesis regarding the relationship between the three aspects was that the perceived Development would match the levels of the perceived Experience and Difficulty for all 15 inquiry components. The quantitative analysis revealed four groups of inquiry components, only two of which aligned with the hypothesis. The quantitative findings are explained based on program design and qualitative data about student effort and ways of coping and teacher-mentor scaffolding methods.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] There is a growing need in the United States for a workforce trained in quantum information science and technology (QIST), a disciplinary topic that is rarely addressed in precollege science, mathematics, and computer science curricula. University quantum physics and physics education researchers designed and initiated a 4-week, 12-h QIST professional development workshop for $N=51$ preservice and in-service secondary school science, mathematics, and computer science educators. A STEM integration framework guided the workshop structure, which incorporated a situated cognition model for learning quantum concepts and computing, identifying recent advances in quantum technologies, planning curricula, and differentiating among QIST subfields including quantum communication, quantum computation, quantum simulation, and quantum metrology and sensing. The pre-/post-research design employed a newly developed teacher attitude survey, Teacher Self-Efficacy in Quantum Information Science and Technology Scale (TSE-QIST). Exploratory factor analysis identified three latent constructs in teachers’ self-efficacy, including (i) knowledge about QIST academic pathways and careers; (ii) QIST pedagogical fluency and STEM integration; and (iii) facilitating QIST learning. Parametric comparisons of means indicated that teacher participants showed significant gains overall and in all latent constructs with medium to large effect sizes ($p<0.001$). This professional learning model shows promise in strengthening teachers’ self-confidence in pedagogical content knowledge of quantum ideas so they may facilitate student engagement in quantum information science, a field that involves conceptual change and is often considered abstract, counterintuitive, inaccessible, and suitable only for the academically elite. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] As one of the successful theories in physics, quantum physics, constructed out of physical ideas and expressed mathematically, provides the required information for the development of technology by describing atomic or quantum systems. For several reasons related to the characteristics of quantum physics knowledge, students struggle with understanding the concepts forcing them to change their classical thinking. However, previous research showed that discussing quantum physics phenomena with peers helped students in problem solving, improving understanding, and constructing quantum physics knowledge. In this study, we focused on students’ knowledge construction in several different quantum physics topics with peer discussions depending on the kind of quantum physics problems and group structure. Examination of students’ tests with 45 quantum physics problems and reflection reports for four sessions during the semester indicated that the occurrence of knowledge construction is associated with group size and gender composition but not with the kind of problems. The knowledge construction condition is also related to group size, and satisfaction with knowledge and disagreements in group discussions are important for the construction of quantum physics knowledge.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] One hallmark of expertise in physics is the ability to translate between different representations of knowledge and use the representations that make the problem-solving process easier. In quantum mechanics, students learn about several ways to represent quantum states, e.g., as state vectors in Dirac notation and as wave functions in position and momentum representation. Many advanced students in upper-level undergraduate and graduate quantum mechanics courses have difficulty translating state vectors in Dirac notation to wave functions in the position or momentum representation and vice versa. They also struggle when translating the wave function between the position and momentum representations. The research presented here describes the difficulties that students have with these concepts and how the research was used as a guide in the development, validation, and evaluation of a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) to help students develop a functional understanding of these concepts. The QuILT strives to help students with different representations of quantum states as state vectors in Dirac notation and as wave functions in position and momentum representation and with translating between these representations. We discuss the effectiveness of the QuILT from in-class implementation and evaluation.

We propose a technique for performing deductive qualitative data analysis at scale on text-based data. Using a natural language processing technique known as text embeddings, we create vector-based representations of texts in a high-dimensional meaning space within which it is possible to quantify differences in meaning as vector distances. To apply the technique, we build off prior work that used topic modeling via latent Dirichlet allocation to thematically analyze 18 years of the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings literature. We first extend this analysis through 2023. Next, we create embeddings of all texts and, using representative articles from the 10 topics found by the LDA analysis, define centroids in the meaning space. We calculate the distances between every article and centroid and use the inverted, scaled distances between these centroids and articles to create an alternate topic model. We benchmark this model against the LDA model results and show that this embeddings model recovers most of the trends from that analysis. Finally, to illustrate the versatility of the method, we define eight new topic centroids derived from a review of the physics education research literature by Docktor and Mestre and reanalyze the literature using these researcher-defined topics. Based on these analyses, we critically discuss the features, uses, and limitations of this method and argue that it holds promise for flexible deductive qualitative analysis of a wide variety of text-based data that avoids many of the drawbacks inherent to prior NLP methods.

Undergraduate students on track for medical school are often required to take general physics lab courses. Many of these students carry an attitude of obligation into these courses which can make it challenging for instructors to engage students in course material. We address the question: How does engaging with medically based models in introductory physics labs affect pre-med undergraduate perceptions of the modeling process and their perceptions of science? We redesigned an electricity and magnetism lab in an introductory physics lab course, where approximately 70% of the undergraduates reported plans to attend medical school. We situated the lab in the mechanics of MRI magnetic resonance and collected data on the participants’ experiences through surveys and lab submissions. As a part of the analysis, we modified a rubric to evaluate engagement in modeling and applied grounded coding theory to the survey responses to develop themes of the participants’ understanding of scientific modeling. The participants’ understanding and engagement in scientific modeling increased during the newly developed lab and remained high for subsequent labs. We recommend that instructors of undergraduate nonmajor labs consider the demographic of their student population and design lab experiences situated within their interests and focus on central science practices like modeling.

We examine students’ challenges in determining the number of distinct many-particle stationary states for a system of noninteracting identical particles, focusing on how these insights guided the design, validation, and evaluation of a quantum interactive learning tutorial (QuILT) to aid students’ understanding. Specifically, we focus on systems with a fixed number of available single-particle states and particles, where the total energy is not fixed. The QuILT is designed to provide scaffolding support to help students learn these complex concepts more effectively. This study was conducted in advanced quantum mechanics courses, where written questions were administered to students in class following traditional instruction on the relevant concepts. Additionally, individual interviews were conducted with students to gain deeper insights. Our findings reveal that both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students face similar challenges in understanding these concepts. Additionally, difficulty with basic concepts in combinatorics that are necessary to answer the questions correctly was also found. The QuILT offers scaffolding support to help undergraduate and graduate students systematically reason through these concepts.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] The present review intends to show the current state of teaching quantum-related content, to analyze and compare its learning efficiency, and to give a systemized overview of quantum-educational activities in the last years. We focus on teaching and learning elements, their innovative tools, and process-oriented studies that are empirically validated. In terms of content, we mainly concentrate on aspects of modern quantum technology. The final dataset for our analysis and synthesis included 50 studies published since 2017 and until the follow-up survey in February 2024. We have found that most of the teaching strategies described and investigated are in the field of quantum mechanics and are designed to provide an introduction to the rather broad and differentiated topic of quantum science. Studies specifically addressing mathematical concepts can exclusively be found for the target group of university students. Visualizing ideas or innovative social interventions to improve quantum learning is mainly found in schools while only a few approaches for further education show validated results. Tools most often examined in the studies reported were of digital nature, though some experiment-focused learning environments were also evaluated.

Faculty members play a crucial role as change agents in promoting cultural transformation within academic environments and empathy, a fundamental component of effective teaching, mentoring, and collegiality, is essential for fostering a student-centered and holistic approach. We present a theoretical model for empathy development and navigation in physics faculty as they engage with students and colleagues. Two pathways—cognitive and affective—are connected with previous work and explored. Cognitive empathy, a slower, intellectual process, is mediated through reflective witnessing, whereas affective empathy, a faster, emotional process, builds on shared or adjacent lived experiences. Understanding the nuances associated with the different pathways can inform efforts to increase participation and foster an inclusive environment, which often presumes a meaningful understanding of what best supports individual students.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Evidence from physics education research suggests that the introduction of a formalistic description of quantum phenomena can be beneficial to student learning, particularly in terms of helping students move away from naive realist views of quanta or space-time descriptions of quantum phenomena. However, the mathematical requirements for mastering quantum formalism are typically far beyond the scope of secondary school education. Therefore, in previous research, we have proposed a reduced Dirac notation tailored to the capabilities of secondary school students, which is included in a novel teaching-learning sequence. However, the cognitive processes of students when confronted with an introduction to quantum physics via a reduced Dirac notation have not been thoroughly investigated: In particular, it seems important to investigate whether this approach is actually beneficial to students’ learning and to explore the learning difficulties students are likely to encounter in such a setting. This paper contributes to this research gap by reporting the findings of an acceptance survey: $N=14$ learners participated in one-on-one interviews following a protocol consisting of four cyclical phases (information phase, acceptance evaluation, paraphrasing phase, and application phase). The findings of our study indicate that the instructional elements within our new teaching-learning sequence were generally well accepted by students but also revealed learning difficulties that students may encounter. Thus, on the one hand, the findings of this study pave the way for future research on students’ learning of quantum physics using Dirac notation. On the other hand, the in-depth findings reported here may guide teachers in designing learning environments that introduce Dirac notation at the upper secondary school and introductory university levels.

In this paper, we demonstrate the fruitfulness of a theoretical framework called Commognition, developed in the context of mathematics education research, for conceptualizing and analyzing a professional development (PD) process on measurement uncertainty for secondary physics teachers. Evaluating measurement uncertainty is an important learning goal in the physics lab and is key to determining the validity of an experiment. While research has mapped difficulties students face and teaching strategies to support them, teacher PD still requires attention, both in capturing teachers’ existing perceptions and in designing PD activities that address these perceptions and support teachers in adopting a more scientifically aligned discourse on measurement uncertainty. Commognition perceives learning as becoming a participant in the discourse of a specific professional community. A discourse consists of keywords, visual mediators, narratives, and routines—and metarules that govern their use. The appropriation of a new discourse involves reconciling conflicts between the metarules of learners’ existing discourse and the new discourse (i.e., commognitive conflicts). We adopted the commognitive framework in all phases of our PD design. First, we mapped the canonical discourse we intended our teachers to adopt versus the prevailing discourse of physics teachers in our national context. Following this mapping, we designed PD tasks intended to lead participants to acknowledge the limitations of their existing discourse on measurement uncertainty as a precursor to internalizing the canonical discourse. Finally, the commognitive framework served as an analytical lens to detect commognitive conflicts involved in collaborative sensemaking among the teachers and between them and the PD facilitators. We demonstrate this type of analysis in a case study, in which learners who hold different discursive metarules encounter implicit commognitive conflicts and discuss implications and untapped opportunities for physics teachers’ PD process on measurement uncertainty.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the interest in the possible causes of the spread of science-based fake news. Indeed, such phenomenon can lead to a generalized distrust of science with serious consequences for our society, ranging from vaccine avoidance to climate change denial. Research in educational psychology has only recently begun to explore the psychological drivers and relationships between misinformation, conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific beliefs. However, existing studies have not focused on specific scientific domains and have involved samples with individuals of different age and sociocultural background. In this empirical study, we focus specifically on the pseudoscientific beliefs of high school students and teachers in a science area where fake news are spreading rapidly on websites and social media, namely, quantum mechanics (QM). To this end, we used a 21-item instrument specifically developed by our group in a previous study to measure pseudoscientific beliefs in QM. The cross-sectional sample included $N=1119$ high school students ($\text{female}\text{students}=52\%$) and $N=125$ high school teachers. The data collected were analyzed using the following methods: confirmatory factor analysis to establish the validity of the instrument; multiple correspondence analysis, to transform categorical variables measuring sociocultural background into continuous variables; repeated measures analysis of variance and linear regression to describe which factors most influence students’ and teachers’ pseudoscientific beliefs. The results show that, for students, endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs in QM depends on the following factors: trust in public and science institutions, scientific content consumption, type of high school attended, and QM literacy. For teachers, endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs in QM depends on the type of degree obtained, QM literacy, perceived usefulness of teaching QM, and confidence in teaching QM. Our study suggests that outreach and popularization interventions for high school students focused on QM, as well as teacher training courses on QM, should also incorporate elements of the nature of science, i.e., on how we develop scientific knowledge, to provide more effective tools to help teachers and students distinguish between correct claims and plausible but false claims, using both prebunking and debunking approaches.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Artificial Intelligence Tools in Physics Teaching and Physics Education Research.] Using a high-stakes thermodynamics exam as the sample (252 students, four multipart problems), we investigate the viability of four workflows for AI-assisted grading of handwritten student solutions. We find that the greatest challenge lies in converting handwritten answers into a machine-readable format. The granularity of grading criteria also influences grading performance: employing a fine-grained rubric for entire problems often leads to errors and grading failures, as the model appears to be unable to keep track of scores for more than a handful of rubric items, while grading problems in parts is more reliable but tends to miss nuances. We also found that grading hand-drawn graphics, such as process diagrams, is less reliable than mathematical derivations due to the difficulty in differentiating essential details from extraneous information. Although the system is precise in identifying exams that meet passing criteria, exams with failing grades still require human grading. We conclude with recommendations to overcome some of the encountered challenges.

Curricular analytics (CA) is a quantitative method that analyzes the sequence of courses (curriculum) that students in an undergraduate academic program must complete to fulfill the requirements of the program. The main hypothesis of CA is that the less complex a curriculum is, the more likely it is that students complete the program. This study compares the curricular complexity of undergraduate physics programs at 60 institutions in the United States. The institutions were divided into three tiers based on national rankings of the physics graduate program, and the means of each tier were compared. No significant difference between the means of each tier was found, indicating that there is not a relationship between program curricular complexity and program ranking. Further analysis focused on the physics, chemistry, and mathematics courses, defined as the core courses of the curriculum. Significant differences in the number of required core courses and the complexity per core course were measured between the tiers; both were measured as large effects. Programs with the highest rankings required fewer core courses while having a higher complexity per core course. These institutions have more strict prerequisite requirements than lower ranking programs. This study also showed complexity was quantitatively related to curricular flexibility operationalized as the number of available eight-semester degree plans. The number of available degree plans exponentially decreased with increasing core complexity per course. Modifications to a curriculum at one institution were analyzed; a similar relationship between the number of available degree plans and increasing complexity per core course was found.

This research focuses on the experiences of seven undergraduate women who were majoring in physics in a medium-size physics department at a small liberal arts college. In the semistructured, empathetic interviews we conducted, the women discussed how they decided to major in physics, their interactions with their peers and instructors, and who supported them during their physics trajectory. We used Standpoint Theory and focused on the experiences of undergraduate women to get a holistic perspective of how they became interested in physics, how they have been supported in their physics journey, as well as identify any challenges that they faced in their undergraduate physics program due to their identity. Using the Domains of Power framework, we analyzed how those in the position of power, e.g., instructors, can play important roles in establishing and maintaining safe, equitable, and inclusive environments for students, which is especially important for historically marginalized students such as women and ethnic and racial minority students in physics.