Demonstration interviews with 27 high school students (18–19 years old) were conducted in Zagreb, Croatia, using several standard experiments on interference and diffraction of light. Students were asked for their predictions, observations, and explanations of the experiments. In this process, many student difficulties were identified, both regarding their understanding of interference and diffraction of light, but also regarding their skills of systematic observation and description of experimental patterns. The observed difficulties were analyzed in the resource-based model, suggesting the activation of some $p$ prims, as well as other cognitive resources in the process of students’ attempts to predict, describe, and explain the interference and diffraction patterns.

We conducted a study with introductory and upper-division physics students in a Mexican university to learn how students independently recognize the electric field’s main characteristics in the electric field lines diagram and as a source or target representation in conversion processes. We used the theory of registers of semiotic representations and a phenomenographic approach as a framework to analyze data. The recognition and conversion abilities were explored through interpretation and construction tasks. We identified students’ main difficulties in recognition and conversion in the interpretation and construction tasks. In conversion processes, we found that when the electric field lines diagram is the source representation, students do not interpret the field lines’ density as the magnitude of the electric field. The difficulties of interpretation that arise in these conversion processes depend partially on the target representation. We also found that constructing electric field lines is especially difficult for students at both introductory and upper-division levels. Most students would prefer to draw vector field plots instead. We recommend that electricity and magnetism teachers and researchers be aware of the difficulties that the recognition and conversion in interpretation and construction tasks may represent for their students in understanding the electric field concept.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] This paper presents a historical analysis of the development, implementation, research, and assessment of an evidence-based introductory algebra-based physics course. The course is laboratory based and taught with an inquiry-based pedagogy. The course has remained unique and has been taught consistently for over 20 years. It is taught predominantly to health science majors and is completely laboratory based without a lecture and without a required text. Students learn by working through a guided inquiry manual in groups, doing experiments to explore the nature of the world around them. They develop both quantitative and qualitative models based on their experiments. The focus is as much on critical thinking, modeling, and thinking like a scientist, as on physics content. I discuss the course throughout the years, presented in the context of the field of physics education research historically and the state of our department locally. The results of multiple forms of assessment are presented chronologically. The assessments were designed to answer research questions about the students’ conceptual understanding and thinking skills, the effects of class size expansion, and questions about learning assistants’ pedagogical content knowledge. One finding was that the conceptual understanding of students in the inquiry-based course was significantly higher than students taught traditionally but not significantly different from students taught by other research-informed pedagogies. However, we found that students taught in the inquiry-based format showed more evidence of the application of thinking skills as assessed by our thinking skills rubric in free-response exam problems. We have demonstrated that it is possible to expand a laboratory-based, inquiry-based physics course from sections of 24 students to sections of 60 students with the help of learning assistants and we have developed and validated a set of questions that can be used to measure learning assistants’ pedagogical content knowledge or for learning assistant training purposes.

Physicists, physics students, and community members come together and engage with physics content through various forms of informal education programming. Our prior work has shown that the landscape of informal physics programs in the United States has a variety of formats, audience demographics, and content. Informal physics programs have many benefits for both facilitators and community members; however, we do not fully understand how the variety of program structures, designs, and organizations affect participants’ experiences. In this study, we apply an organizational theory framework to study the connectedness of six functional aspects of informal physics programs: Assessment, Audience, Institution, Personnel, Program, and Resources. We interview lead facilitators about the design and structure of their programs. Here we present an in-depth qualitative analysis of three cases. We find that the personnel, consisting of the faculty, staff, and physics students facilitating the educational activities, have a prominent role in these programs. Our findings show how personnel members influence the physics content, activities, and interactions with the audience. We discuss how understanding these aspects can help support improving the functionality of informal physics programs in equitable and inclusive ways.

Previous studies have shown the important role of different representations in the teaching and learning of physics. In this study, we used eye tracking to investigate the effect of different representations on the process of answering conceptual questions. We compared students’ scores and eye-tracking measures on isomorphic questions which contained graphical, pictorial, and verbal representations. On average, in two-thirds of cases, students were consistent in their answers (correct or incorrect) across all three representations. There was no statistically significant difference in students’ scores for different representations. However, eye-tracking measures suggest that it was easiest for students to extract information from verbal representations and most difficult from pictorial representations for the conceptual questions used in this study. These results could be useful to teachers and researchers when creating conceptual questions and, more generally, when teaching with multiple representations.

Textbooks play a fundamental role in teaching and learning in school science classrooms. In this paper, we investigate the presentation of the nature of the electromagnetic field in a dozen of the world’s most popular introductory university physics textbooks. We analyze, from an epistemologically based teaching approach, the didactic treatment of the electromagnetic field in relation to its sources, Maxwell’s laws and electromagnetic waves. With this objective, we elaborate a rational reconstruction of the developments that led to the formulation of the nature of the electromagnetic field, Maxwell’s laws and their meaning, as well as electromagnetic waves. Next, we formulate criteria based on the key aspects derived from the reconstruction that are useful in the evaluation of electromagnetism textbooks at the introductory level and apply them to the sample of selected books. In light of the results, we reflect on their consequences for teaching. Our analysis indicates the existence of certain inconsistencies in the approach to the electromagnetic field and its relationship with its sources, Maxwell’s laws and electromagnetic waves in many of the books analyzed.

We discuss the development and validation of the long version of a conceptual multiple-choice survey instrument called the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long suitable for introductory physics courses. This version of the survey instrument is a longer version of the original shorter version developed and validated earlier. The 19 contexts including the exact wording of all of the problem situations posed in the two versions of the survey instrument are identical and the difference between the long and short versions of the instrument is only in the multiple-choice options. In particular, in the longer version of the survey instrument, there are no alternative conceptions explicitly embedded in the four multiple-choice options students choose from and the questions asked in a given context in one item of the shorter survey instrument were split into several items focusing, e.g., on different thermodynamic variables. After the development and validation of the longer version of the survey instrument, the final version was administered in 12 different in-person classes (four different institutions) in which students answered the questions in-class on paper scantron forms with the instructor as the proctor and 12 different in-person classes (five different institutions) in which students answered the questions online on Qualtrics within a two-hour period. This longer version of the survey instrument was administered to introductory physics students in various traditionally taught calculus-based and algebra-based classes before and after traditional lecture-based instruction in relevant concepts. It was also administered to upper-level undergraduates majoring in physics and Ph.D. students taught traditionally for bench marking purposes and for concurrent validity, which involved comparing advanced students’ performance with those of introductory students for whom the survey is intended. Similar to the shorter version, we find that although the longer version of the survey instrument focuses on thermodynamics concepts covered in introductory courses, it is challenging even for advanced students. A comparison with the baseline data on the longer version of the validated survey instrument presented here can help instructors evaluate the effectiveness of innovative pedagogies designed to help students develop a solid grasp of these concepts.

We have investigated the temporal patterns of algebra ($N=606$) and calculus ($N=507$) introductory physics students practicing multiple basic physics topics several times throughout the semester using an online mastery homework application called science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fluency aimed at improving basic physics skills. For all skill practice categories, we observed an increase in measures of student accuracy, such as a decrease in the number of questions attempted to reach mastery, and a decrease in response time per question, resulting in an overall decrease in the total time spent on the assignments. The findings in this study show that there are several factors that impact a student’s performance and evolution on the mastery assignments throughout the semester. For example, using linear mixed modeling, we report that students with lower math preparation for the physics class start with lower accuracy and slower response times on the mastery assignments than students with higher math preparation. However, by the end of the semester, the less prepared students reach similar performance levels to their more prepared classmates on the mastery assignments. This suggests that STEM fluency is a useful tool for instructors to implement to refresh student’s basic math skills. Additionally, gender and procrastination habits impact the effectiveness and progression of the student’s response time and accuracy on the STEM fluency assignments throughout the semester. We find that women initially answer more questions in the same amount of time as men before reaching mastery. As the semester progresses and students practice the categories more, this performance gap diminishes between males and females. In addition, we find that students who procrastinate (those who wait until the final few hours to complete the assignments) are spending more time on the assignments despite answering a similar number of questions as compared to students who do not procrastinate. We also find that student mindset (growth vs fixed mindset) was not related to a student’s progress on the online mastery assignments. Finally, we find that STEM fluency practice improves performance beyond the effects of other components of instruction, such as lectures, group-work recitations, and homework assignments.

There is growing awareness that established structures of higher education are often predicated on problematic assumptions about merit, excellence, and rigor. Doctoral qualifying exams, for example, are required to advance to candidacy in many Ph.D. programs despite decades of documented concerns about the implications of standard modes for student equity and well-being. As more Ph.D. programs move to reform these exams and candidacy requirements, it is important to understand how Ph.D. programs, as academic organizations, construct the significance of the qualifying exam. A sociocultural lens suggests qualifying exams and the learning that enables their passage are symbolic rituals that move doctoral students from legitimate peripheral participation toward full membership and belonging in academic communities of practice. We conducted a comparative case study to understand how two Ph.D. programs in the physical sciences that have reformed their candidacy requirements—one elite and one middle ranked but striving for respect—constructed the significance and purpose of their qualifying exam and the broader transition to candidacy. Our inquiry included the contexts and mechanisms that mediated student learning. Through interviews with faculty, staff, and students, we found that the Ph.D. programs’ recognition of their status within their respective disciplines emerged as a crucial component in constructions about the significance of exams and candidacy. The middle-ranked Ph.D. program changed the exam and candidacy structure to reflect legitimate practices in their discipline. The elite Ph.D. program created multiple pathways toward candidacy to mitigate long-standing concerns about gender equity and student well-being. Despite the structural changes, the Ph.D. programs left intact cultural understandings of merit, excellence, and rigor that maintain inequity in doctoral socialization. Our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should pay more attention to designing and implementing structures that facilitate faculty assessments of doctoral student learning.

The multiple-choice section of the final examination for the first-year Advanced Physics I course at the University of Newcastle, Australia between 2010 and 2018 was investigated for gender bias. A Mantel-Haenszel analysis revealed that approximately 20% of the multiple-choice questions exhibited statistically significant gender bias. A schema for characterizing the multiple-choice questions was proposed and used to analyze the entire question set. Male bias questions showed moderate to large bias and tended to include characteristics related to visualization, though not images. Several questions exhibited a moderate bias in favor of females and were characterized by requiring a numerical calculation involving a simple one-step equation. These results indicate that with continued development, gender bias analysis of physics questions based on a characterization schema may be used as a routine tool for testing for the presence and origin of gender gaps in student performance.

The aim of this research study was to explore learning, i.e., changes in the knowledge structures of three in-service science teachers for the subject of active galaxies, through group activity conducted as part of a teacher training program. Qualitative methods were used in this study consisting of creating visual representations of the teachers’ knowledge structures by analyzing texts, drawings, and data obtained through observations of and interviews with the teachers. The results show that new information acquired through conversations was incorporated into the teachers’ preexisting knowledge structures through elaboration and organization. In the case of a teacher with a cognitive conflict, acceptance of the new information depended on the teacher’s level of satisfaction with the explanations given. The main influence factor for the modification of knowledge structures was the teachers’ orientation to science teaching. These findings suggest that in-service teacher training based on group activities can effectively enhance teachers’ confidence in content knowledge (CK) of recent updates in scientific research. However, some format modifications are needed to guarantee efficient learning, such as the addition of a CK representation stage and discussion items based on the preactivity knowledge structure selected through expert review.

The practices of a departmental action team (DAT) are examined to characterize their change effort in their undergraduate program. The DAT’s effort was guided by the DAT model’s six core principles. The core principles are grounded in best practices for higher education and organizational change literature. Meeting minutes, facilitator journal entries, and exit interviews are analyzed to identify ways in which the core principles influenced the change effort. This analysis provides insight into how the core principles can be leveraged to enact positive change in education. Furthermore, this work provides a method for researchers to characterize other complex change efforts.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] This article details methodologies employed to enable sharing and coconstructing the stories of three women’s lives in physics. The first case explores the usefulness of timeline interviewing, where participants narrate episodes that are coconstructed with the researcher as meaningful over time. We illustrate this method in the case of a mature student in Sweden from a working-class background who shared moments that added up to a life outside of physics and then a sharp turn into physics later in life. The second case explores life-history interviewing using a narrative-inquiry approach and deep relationship building which enabled the coconstruction of stories of experiences over time. These moments are coconstructed with the researcher and analyzed using an intersectionality lens to yield a story depicting the transnational experiences of a woman of color moving across various European contexts into the North American physics context. The final case is of a first-generation Canadian woman of color who shared her navigations of in and out of school physics via a method known as the “Rivers of Life.” Using this method, the participant narrates their experiences with physics as a river, using metaphorical tools like rafts, rocks, rapids, tributaries to discuss various moments described as twists and turns over time that together amount to a life in physics. We discuss the value of different approaches to coconstructing narratives with participants and, in particular, the need for this kind of research in physics contexts.

Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical uncertainty in upper-division courses. This study is part of a larger project evaluating student thinking about uncertainty across these contexts. In this research, we investigate advanced physics student thinking about uncertainty by asking them conceptual questions about how a hypothetical distribution of measurements would change if “more” or “better” data were collected in four different experimental scenarios. The scenarios include both classical and quantum experiments, as well as experiments that theoretically result in an expected single value or an expected distribution. This investigation is motivated by our goal of finding insights into students’ potential point- and setlike thinking about uncertainty and of shining light on the limitations of those binary paradigms.

This study seeks to determine whether giving an explicit incentive to students in an upper-division first-semester electromagnetism course (EM1), in the form of partial credit for reworking unit exam problems, will improve their problem-solving skills as measured by performance on identical problems on the final exam. Three problems–a primarily algorithmic problem, a primarily conceptual problem, and a problem that blended conceptual with algorithmic–were selected and analyzed over the course of three consecutive sections of EM1, for which each student could freely choose whether or not to rework mistakes on each one of the given problems in exchange for the aforementioned partial credit. Regression models were chosen for quantitative analysis, with the covariate being unit exam performance and whether the student reworked the problem. Results indicate that overall, students who choose to rework problems perform better on the final exam attempt, at a level that often does not correlate strongly with unit exam performance, whereas students who decline to rework problems have a stronger correlation between unit exam and final exam performances. The results show a clear difference between the two stages of problem-solving, namely, invoking the correct principles and applying the principles, where the latter showed a more significant effect with a much larger effect size. Qualitative analysis of a sample of students interviewed about their exam solutions showed that reworking an exam problem for some students did result in more expertlike problem-solving trends; that being said, there were instances of persistent novicelike trends regardless of reworking, as well as instances of students independently reviewing unit exam problems in preparation for the final even though the partial credit incentive was declined at the time of the unit exam. Thus, while the intervention showed overall benefits insofar as exam performance is concerned, the usage of more well-defined scaffolding, e.g., tutorials, may prove a more thorough and definite benefit for improving problem-solving skills.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] In recent years, physics instructional labs have been under considerable research and development. However, there seems to be no shared understanding of how the assessment of instructional labs should be arranged to best serve students’ learning and development of expertise. This literature review intends to fill this gap by reviewing the research on classroom assessment of instructional labs from the perspectives of different objectives, purposes, and agents of assessment. The review reveals that classroom assessment in instructional labs has mostly focused on summative assessment, leaving the possibilities of formative assessment understudied. Further, assessment has been conducted mostly by teachers and teaching assistants, and the possibilities for students’ participation in assessment remain unutilized. Two major gaps in the research on instructional labs were identified. The first gap concerns students’ active participation in assessment. Given the active role that students have in the laboratory, their agency in assessment appears to be narrow. The second gap concerns the inclusion of metaskills and perspectives on lifelong learning and work life in assessment. We summarize our findings into a research-based model that assists in the consideration and balancing of different objectives, purposes, and agents in the design of classroom assessment of instructional labs.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] We present the pedagogical design and implementation of “ESSENCe”: Experimental problem solving using Staging, Scaffolding, Embedded information sources, iNstruments, and Collaboration. Research in experimental physics requires problem-solving skills that include designing investigations, developing instrumentation techniques, troubleshooting, planning data analysis, and evaluating experimental outcomes. Most of these skills can be taught at the undergraduate level but are unfortunately skipped in traditional cookbook-recipe style labs. Since many physics experiments require electronics, the ESSENCe pedagogy presented here has been developed in the context of undergraduate electronics laboratory courses. The goals of ESSENCe labs are to help students apply their theoretical knowledge of electronics to hands-on open-ended experiments, understand properties of physical systems and limitations of measurements, and to learn how to work with sophisticated instruments used in experimental research. ESSENCe emphasizes collaboration with peers and teaching assistants. This paper presents the results of ESSENCe implementation in a sophomore undergraduate analog electronics lab of 45–60 students over multiple years in a top-ranked technological university in India. A mixed methods study was conducted to analyze students’ development of experimental problem-solving skills through repeated measures of performance on experimental tests and video analysis of students working on the experiments. We found statistically significant improvement in students’ experimental problem-solving skills over the course of a semester. The study also analyzed students’ perceptions about the benefits and challenges of the open-ended collaborative lab.

Instructors and researchers often use research-based assessments to identify the impact of instructional activities. These investigations often focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusions by comparing outcomes across social identity groups (e.g., gender, race, and class). Comparisons across groups assume the assessments measure the same factors in the same way across social identity groups. Very few research-based assessments, however, have validation evidence to support this assumption. Measurement invariance testing provides validity evidence that an assessment measures latent factors (e.g., Newtonian thinking or physics identity) equivalently across groups. We examined the measurement invariance of the Eaton and Willoughby five (EW5) factor model on the Force Concept Inventory. We found evidence for measurement invariance across the intersections of gender (men and women) and race or ethnicity (Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, and White Hispanic). These results indicate that performance differences across the five factors can further understanding of equity in physics courses. Without measurement invariance, such work could produce misleading results that undermine efforts to support equity in physics courses.

Physics graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are tasked with multifaceted teaching assignments, such as leading tutorials and inquiry-based laboratories, yet their professional development rarely includes opportunities to rehearse complex pedagogical skills or receive feedback on their teaching. In this study, physics GTAs practiced specific pedagogical skills during four sessions in a mixed-reality classroom simulator; here, we focus on GTAs’ use of a specific questioning strategy called “Stretch-It.” GTAs can apply Stretch-It by asking students to explain their logic (Explain Logic), either by explaining their work or providing evidence for their claim; or by asking students to take the content further (Follow-Up), either by applying it in an analogous situation or answering the initial question in another way. We found GTAs used all four types of Stretch-It subcategories during simulator sessions that incorporated facilitator feedback about their use of questioning. We also compared the use of Stretch-It questioning in the classroom for a pretraining semester cohort and the high-intensity simulator training cohort and found that the high-intensity cohort’s average use of Explain Logic questions in the observation immediately following the Stretch-It rehearsal was meaningfully higher than the pretraining cohort’s average use of Explain Logic. However, the high-intensity cohort’s use of Explain Logic is unstable, and values fall back within the pretraining average in subsequent classroom observations. We did not find a significant difference between the cohorts’ use of Follow-Up. We discuss the implications of our findings for science, technology, engineering, and medicine GTA professional development and the significance of providing feedback to GTAs about their teaching.