Limiting case analysis (LCA) is important to practicing physicists. Yet, there is little concrete guidance for physics educators, and a lack of consensus in the research community about how to help students learn, and learn from, limiting case analysis. In this study, we first review existing literature to find commonalities and variations in how instructors encourage and assess students’ limiting case analysis and to highlight how it has been used by practicing physicists. Then, we examine written work from successive cohorts of physics students, all of whom have completed a course with the same instructor who emphasizes limiting case analysis in his teaching. We frame our analysis largely in terms of the theoretical framework of “adaptive expertise,” finding support in the literature for the view that it is the nonalgorithmic and even playful aspects of LCA that are instrumental to its alignment with adaptive expertise rather than routine expertise. Analysis of students’ commentary about how they decide which limiting cases to examine when evaluating the reasonableness of an equation provides new insights into how LCA might be better supported in the classroom so that more students can access this important tool of physics.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Participation in undergraduate research experiences (UREs) has been identified as an important way of increasing undergraduate retention, interest, and identity within the sciences. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been shown to have similar outcomes to UREs but can reach a larger number of students at one time and are accessible to any student simply through enrollment in a course. One key component of a CURE is that students must participate in authentic scientific discovery in which they answer a question where the answer is initially unknown to both students and the scientific community. Here, we present student experiences with authentic research in a large, introductory physics CURE conducted remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use student responses to a closed ended survey question, as well as written responses to an open-ended end-of-course assignment to investigate what aspects of real research students felt that they participated in and the extent to which students felt that they participated in authentic research. Most students in the course felt like they engaged in real-world research during the course and a large number of students highlighted their experience with authentic research when asked to describe their experience in the course more broadly. We discuss which elements of the course may have contributed to the students’ experiences of authentic research.

We examine the effectiveness of a planning prompt intervention to reduce procrastination on online homework for college students. The intervention asked students to indicate their intention to earn small amounts of extra credit for completing assignments earlier and form a plan to realize their intentions. Students’ learning behavior is measured by five data metrics collected from gradebook and student interaction logs from four sections of the same college level physics course, including three metrics that capture how students space their work on assignments and two that measure the level of student engagement when completing assignments. To separate the impact of extraneous factors from the treatment effect, we employ a “difference in differences” method—initially developed in economics—and construct multilinear models for each of the five metrics. Our models show that by simply asking students to form a plan prior to the assignment, students on average earned 5% more extra credit, completed homework significantly earlier, and spread out their work significantly more. However, the intervention did not significantly change students’ level of engagement with the learning materials, nor did it change students’ work distribution on the next assignment.

Science education research has repeatedly revealed students’ problems with understanding the energy concept, in particular, their understanding of potential energy. Newer research suggests that teaching students fields as a means to store potential energy may promote a more consistent understanding of the energy concept. Yet, it is presently unknown if the helpfulness of fields is limited to particular manifestations of potential energy or if the conceptualization of potential energy as energy stored in fields may constitute a coherent approach that supports students’ continued learning on energy. To address this issue, we carried out a quasiexperimental pre-post-test study with $N=64$ students from grade 6, with students being assigned to one of two conditions (fields-based vs nonfields-based approach to energy instruction). We also compared students continued learning in a subsequent unit on electric energy. Our findings suggest that students in the fields approach not only outperformed students in the nonfields approach, they were, in particular, able to use their understanding of potential energy to make better sense of electric energy, a form of energy previously unknown to them. The results of our study imply that fields can help students develop a deeper understanding of energy, in particular potential energy, and support continued learning about energy; that is, the learning about additional forms of energy.

Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists’ careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover, has tended to be constructed narrowly as a route to solving physics problems. Here, we broaden Physics Education Research’s conception of computation by constructing a metamodel—a model of modeling—incorporating insights on computational modeling from the philosophy of science and prior work. The metamodel is formulated in terms of practices, things physicists do, and how these inform one another. We operationalize this metamodel in an educational environment that incorporates making, the creation of shared physical and digital artifacts, intended to promote students’ agency, creativity, and self-expression alongside doing physics. We present a content analysis of student work from initial implementations of this approach to illustrate the very complex epistemic maneuvers students make as they engaged in computational modeling. We demonstrate how our metamodel can be used to understand student practices and conclude with implications of the metamodel for instruction and future research.

We investigated how the endorsement of gender stereotypes affects disciplinary identity across three different science-technology-engineering-mathematics (STEM) areas: physics, biology, and chemistry, and whether such relationship is mediated by self-concept constructs, such as self-efficacy and perceived academic control. Building on the ambivalent sexism theory and masculine ideology paradigm, we focused on gender stereotypes based on hostile and benevolent sexism and on male role norms. A sample of 1406 Italian high school students ($\text{girls}=742$) was involved in the study. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships. Results show that the adherence to male role norms and the rejection of hostile sexism have a significant effect on the development of a disciplinary identity in the three targeted STEM domains. However, such an effect is fully mediated by self-efficacy and perceived academic control. Moreover, the identity in the three addressed STEM domains is differently affected by the endorsement of stereotypes, with physics and biology being more largely affected than chemistry. More importantly, the endorsement of hostile sexism stereotypes significantly decreases the perceived self-efficacy, while higher levels of perceived academic control are predicted by higher levels of endorsement of male role norms, for both girls and boys. Our findings suggest that to reduce the perception of femininity as incongruent with STEM identification, it would be necessary to deconstruct the masculine view of self-efficacy and academic control.

The present study examined demographic and academic predictors of astronomy performance among a cohort of $N=1909$ community college students enrolled in astronomy courses in a large suburban community college during a four-year time frame, 2015–2019. The theoretical framework was based upon a deconstructive approach for predicting community college performance, whereby students’ academic pathways through higher education institutions are examined to understand their dynamic interaction with institutional integration and progress toward academic goals. Transcript data analysis was employed to elicit student demographics and longitudinal academic coursework and performance. A logistic regression model was generated to identify significant predictors of astronomy performance, which included mathematics achievement, enrollment in remedial mathematics, and enrollment in multiple astronomy courses. The results imply a greater focus on mathematics preparation and performance may mediate astronomy outcomes for community college students. Notably, demographic variables including ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and age were not significant predictors of astronomy performance in the multivariable model, suggesting the course is a potential gateway for diversifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics access. Also, astronomy interest, as measured by enrollment in multiple astronomy courses, was related to performance. Further implications for practice are discussed.

Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one’s existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the physical world. In the current work, we provide an explicit, framework-based analysis of the intertwining between modeling and sensemaking by analyzing think-aloud interviews of two students solving a physics problem. While one student completes the task, the other abandons their approach. The case studies reveal that particular aspects of modeling and sensemaking processes co-occur. For instance, the priming on the ‘given’ information from the problem statement constituted the students’ engagement with their mental models, and their attempts to resolve inconsistencies in understanding involved the use of external representations. We find that barriers experienced in modeling can inhibit students’ sustained sensemaking. These results suggest ways for future research to support students’ sensemaking in physics by promoting modeling practices.

As quantum information science and technology (QIST) is becoming more prevalent and occurring not only in research labs but also in industry, many educators are considering how best to incorporate learning about quantum mechanics into various levels of education. Although much of the focus has been on quantum concepts in nonlab courses, current work in QIST has a substantial experimental component. Many instructors of undergraduate lab courses want to provide their students the opportunity to work with quantum experiments. One common way this is done is through a sequence of quantum optics experiments often referred to as the “single-photon experiments.” These experiments demonstrate fundamental quantum phenomena with equipment common to research labs; however, they are resource intensive and cannot be afforded by all institutions. It is therefore imperative to know what unique affordances these experiments provide to students. As a starting point, we surveyed and interviewed instructors who use the single-photon experiments in undergraduate courses, asking how and why they use the experiments. We describe the most commonly used experiments in both quantum and beyond-first-year lab courses, the prevalence of actions the students perform, and the learning goals, ranging from conceptual knowledge to lab skills to student affect. Finally, we present some strategies from these data demonstrating how instructors have addressed the common challenges of preparing students to work with conceptually and technically complex experiments and balancing the practice of technical skills with the completion of the experiments.

A large-enrollment, introductory physics laboratory course at the University of Colorado Boulder has undergone a recent transformation to help students’ develop lab skills and better align students’ views and beliefs about experimental physics with those of expert experimental physicists through engagement with authentic scientific practices. We examine the impact of the transformation on women and men in the course and report the effect of this transformation on the students’ views and beliefs using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) as a measurement tool. We analyze over 3000 student responses from both before and after the transformation for both women and men on overall E-CLASS scores, as well as item-by-item. The results show statistically significant increase in the overall average E-CLASS score after the transformation as compared to that of the course before the transformation regardless of gender. In addition, item-by-item analysis indicates that there are larger gains in a few E-CLASS items, especially those related to the new course learning goals and some of these items are different for women and men. Our results show that students can have different lab experiences depending on their identity, an important aspect that should to be taken into account when designing educational interventions.

Mainstream physics teaching and learning produces material outcomes that, when analyzed through the lens of Critical Race Theory, point to white supremacy, or “the systemic maintenance of the dominant position that produces white privilege” (Battey & Levya, 2016). In particular, the continued, extreme underrepresentation of People of Color in physics and a growing number of first-person accounts of the harm that People of Color experience in physics classrooms and departments speak to a system that valorizes whiteness and marginalizes People of Color. If we take Critical Race Theory as a lens, we expect that maintaining white supremacy in physics happens in part via discipline-specific instantiations of broader mechanisms that reproduce whiteness. In this study, we illustrate one such mechanism: race evasiveness, a powerful ideology that uses race-neutral discourse to explain away racialized phenomena, evading race as a shaping force in social phenomena. We offer examples from interviews with twelve university physics faculty, showing what race-evasive discourses can look like in physics and how physics epistemologies, discourses, and stories reify race-evasive frames. This work aims to support faculty in refusing race evasiveness in physics teaching and learning, toward developing race-conscious analyses that can help us challenge white supremacy in our discipline.

This study developed and validated an instrument to investigate senior school students’ understanding of electrostatics and provide a cognitive diagnostic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses on the related concepts (e.g., electric charge). The instrument included 20 four-tier multiple-choice items and the development process is organized around two activities: the development of the instrument and its validation. The development step defined the secondary concepts and designed the items using the misconceptions related to them. In the validation step, the instrument was applied to 1850 senior high school students from nine schools in two provinces in China, and the collected data were analyzed using the CDM package in R language. This step ensures that the diagnostic reports represent students’ conceptual understanding reliably and validly by selecting the best model, analyzing item quality, overall test reliability, and the instrument’s structure. The instrument can provide the percentage of students in the test population who possess certain combinations of concepts, the percentage of students in the test population possessing individual concepts, and the fine-grained size of concept proficiency information, which can be integrated as one completed report to issue to students, teachers, and parents to demonstrate students’ status of conceptual understanding related to electrostatics. In addition, the construct induced from the diagnostic results can also be aggregated to the classroom, schools for instruction planning or low-stakes decision making, or infer a learning sequence.

Learning assistants (LAs) play an important role in inquiry-oriented physics instruction in large classrooms. LAs increase the teacher-student ratio and provide timely support to student exploration. Questioning is believed to be an advantageous strategy for LAs to scaffold student learning and maintain students as the agent of knowledge construction. Unfortunately, there are few instruments for the measurement and preparation of LAs’ competency of questioning. It remains obscure how LAs use questioning in their interaction with students and how their questioning contributes to students’ conceptual understanding. In this study, we developed two instruments that included a coding scheme to assess LAs’ practice of questioning from class videos and written questions to assess LAs’ knowledge of analyzing various situations that they may encounter while teaching introductory physics. We used the two instruments to measure performed and narrated pedagogical content knowledge of questioning (PCK-Q) of four LAs in two inquiry-based physics courses taught online. We examined the validity and reliability of both instruments, gauged LA-student interaction in online settings, delineated the LAs’ PCK-Q, and suggested how the LAs’ questioning contributed to students’ physics learning. We also discussed the use of the two instruments for the purposes of both LA assessment and preparation.

Students hold a variety of initial (mis)conceptions that are inconsistent with scientific knowledge and hinder their physics learning. The initial (mis)conceptions could coexist with the scientific ones, even after a conceptual change. Inhibitory control may help overcome initial (mis)conceptions. This study investigated if and how inhibitory control can overcome position-velocity indiscrimination (PVI), a common kinematics misconception. We designed a negative priming paradigm with various prime-probe item pairs. College physics majors had to judge if the items describing the instant that two locomotives have the same velocity were correct. When congruent probes (same position-same velocity) were followed by incongruent primes (same position-different velocity), participants performed worse than when neutral primes (i.e., not passing points) were presented beforehand. The result verified a typical negative priming effect, indicating that inhibitory control is involved in overcoming the PVI misconception. Congruent probes preceded by incongruent primes implicitly triggering the PVI misperception had a lower negative priming effect than explicitly activating it. The results indicated that inhibitory control was needed to overcome the PVI misconception, and the explicit activation of the misconception required more inhibitory control.

Recently Burkholder et al. argued that class normalized gains over the entire population of courses is approximated by a Cauchy distribution, not by a normal distribution, and therefore should not be used to compare different classes because means and standard deviations cannot be calculated. They argued that multiple linear regression should be used instead. Burkholder et al. provided very little data in support of their belief, but instead provided a theoretical argument with certain assumptions. We shall show that these assumptions are unreasonable. We also show explicitly how normalized gains from 114 clases taught by six different instructors are indeed normally distributed and how two other even larger samples are roughly normally distributed and are not remotely like a Cauchy distribution. The continued use of normalized gains by physics instructors is therefore justified.

This study examines survey data from 2127 undergraduate women at the 2015 and 2019 American Physical Society Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) in order to classify what led them to study physics. We use expectancy-value and self-efficacy theory to create a coding framework based on different types of value and efficacy expectations in order to group responses. We find that the most common attractions are social persuasion, which is due to pressure or persuasion from people around the students, and intrinsic value, which is related to the inherent value of engaging in physics. Once the responses have been classified, we examine a follow-up survey to study whether the different motivational factors affect retention. We find that students who join physics because of the community are less likely to remain in physics after finishing their undergraduate studies. This is the first stage of a longer project to study which qualities correlate with retention in undergraduate women.

Broadly speaking, many physicists value intuition in their work, and many instructors hope their students develop intuition (while possibly being wary of their initial, unrefined intuitions). These considerations are especially relevant in quantum mechanics, a subject many see as counterintuitive because it is removed from classical everyday experience. Do students consider quantum mechanics intuitive, how does this affect their approach to the subject, and what does “intuitive” mean to them? We investigate these questions through a mixed-methods approach within the context of one upper-division quantum mechanics class at an R1 university. We find that most students in this population expect to have little intuition for quantum mechanics, so many consider it more unintuitive than counterintuitive. We also find that students use the word intuitive to refer to a number of distinct ideas. Overall, students have a diverse set of perspectives on intuition and its role in studying quantum mechanics. This study lays groundwork for additional research into students’ views on intuition in physics and informs how we can address intuition as educators. Quantum instructors should be aware of their students’ perspectives on intuition, and can integrate the different ways students perceive intuition into their lessons.

Even after research-based instruction, students who demonstrate the ability to assemble relevant conceptual knowledge on one physics question may have difficulty assembling that same knowledge on a closely related problem. Recent research has suggested that reflexive, bottom-up reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to the physics concepts themselves may be responsible for these difficulties. Research has also suggested that attending to these reflexive processes during instruction may improve performance to a greater degree than attending solely to top-down, reflective thinking. Leveraging these findings to meaningfully improve instruction is important. We have, therefore, investigated the impact of training focused on Newton’s second law targeted at reflexive reasoning processes and compared results to a more standard reflective approach to the same topic. We find that an approach targeted toward reflexive reasoning processes improves performance on a difficult physics question to the same or greater degree as a typical reflective approach. Furthermore, we find that many students whose performance on a difficult physics question increased after the reflexive training also explained correct conceptual reasoning on that question, suggesting that conceptual understanding was bolstered by the bottom-up, reflexive training.

Prior research has indicated that students in the undergraduate physics lab divide work inequitably with regard to gender. In this work, we further probed women’s experiences in lab group work, focusing on women who take on managerial and leadership roles in the lab. We interviewed and surveyed women enrolled in a sophomore-level project-based lab course, drawing on a practice-linked identity framework to characterize their opportunities for engagement and identity development within the course. Although we observed some gender inequities in group work, we also found that taking on a manager role had a positive impact on many women’s development of physics lab identity. Our results suggest that instructors should take into account women’s individual experiences and preferences for particular roles when structuring equitable group work.

Social network analysis (SNA) has been gaining traction as a technique for quantitatively studying student collaboration. We analyze networks, constructed from student self-reports of collaboration on homework assignments, in two courses from the University of Colorado Boulder and one course from the Colorado School of Mines. All three courses occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allows for a comparison between the course at the Colorado School of Mines (in a fully remote format) with results from a previous pre-pandemic study of student collaboration at the Colorado School of Mines (in an in-person format), as well as comparison between the Mines results with the two University of Colorado courses (in a hybrid format). We compute nodal centrality measures and calculate the correlation between student centrality and performance. Results varied widely between each of the courses studied. The course at the Colorado School of Mines had strong correlations between many centrality measures and performance which matched the patterns seen in the pre-pandemic study. The courses at the University of Colorado Boulder showed weaker correlations, and one course showed nearly no correlations at all between students’ connectivity to their classmates and their performance. Taken together, the results from the trio of courses indicate that the context and environment in which the course is situated play a more important role in fostering a correlation between student collaboration and course performance than the format (remote, hybrid, in-person) of the course, a finding which has implications for the broader use of SNA within physics education research. Additionally, we conducted a short study on the effect that missing nodes may have on the correlations calculated from the measured networks, an analysis largely missing from the SNA literature within PER. This investigation showed that missing nodes tend to shift correlations towards zero, providing evidence that the statistically significant correlations measured in our networks are not spurious.