Recent educational policies advocate a radical revision of science curricula and pedagogy, to support interdisciplinary practices, a distinguishing feature of contemporary science. Computational modeling (CM) is a core methodology of interdisciplinary science, as such models allow intertwining of data and theoretical perspectives from multiple domains, to address complex problems such as climate change and pandemics. This integrative nature of CM could support the pedagogical transition to interdisciplinary science as well. Most approaches to introduce CM in science curricula are based on learning new practices, such as VPython programming or agent-based modeling. These approaches do not integrate CM with existing content, media, and teaching practices. To facilitate this integration, we present a more gradualist design, starting from derivation models in physics. This design was implemented as a set of teacher professional development modules, and presented to a group of physics teachers interested in introducing CM to undergraduate students. The analysis of their responses indicates that even this gradual transition to CM requires teachers to significantly revise their ideas about the nature of physics and physics learning (their personal epistemologies). We discuss how the teacher professional development modules were redesigned based on this finding.

Modeling, which is the process of constructing, testing, and refining models, is an important skill in experimental physics, and thus a learning goal of many physics laboratory classes. One promising approach to help students develop modeling skills is to incorporate multiweek student-designed projects into lab courses. In order to assess the potential benefits of these projects in enhancing students’ modeling abilities, we analyzed projects from three upper-division lab courses at different institutions. By looking at written student coursework and student interviews, we investigated which parts of the modeling process the students from each project undertook, and how this engagement in modeling differed depending on features of the projects. The projects in our dataset varied widely, showing evidence of different ways students engaged with model construction and revisions. We observed that the features of the projects, such as the goal of the project and the complexity of the required apparatus, were associated with the ways in which the students constructed models and enacted revisions. This has implications for how instructors may choose to frame and structure courses with student-designed lab projects.

There is growing interest in implementing reform-based lab courses in undergraduate physics that are student driven rather than instructor driven. In these courses, students develop and carry out experiments while simultaneously reasoning about their hypotheses, data collection procedures, collected evidence, and the relevant physics content. However, there is a limited understanding of how students reason in these types of labs. Using the theoretical framework of sensemaking, we examine qualitative observational data of undergraduates engaging in open-ended experimentation in reform-based introductory physics for life sciences labs. We examine the moment-by-moment details of students’ sensemaking by focusing on a series of inconsistencies, specifically focusing on what the inconsistencies are about and what moves students enact during sensemaking to resolve them. We explore sensemaking about conceptual and procedural inconsistencies through a narrative case study analysis of a single group whose sensemaking is largely representative of the observed data corpus. We find that students engaged in sensemaking to resolve conceptual inconsistencies by juxtaposing hypotheses and evidence and critiquing and constructing scientific explanations, sometimes evoking elements of mechanistic reasoning. Comparably, we find that students engaged in sensemaking to resolve procedural inconsistencies by proposing and testing a series of causes towards modifying experimental procedures or apparatus. Overall, we find that student sensemaking about both types of inconsistencies is generally productive, given students’ resolutions and experimental progress. Capturing detailed sensemaking about inconsistencies highlights the richness of students’ reasoning processes in this understudied learning environment that is becoming more prevalent.

Learning assistants (LAs) are peer educators who work alongside faculty to facilitate active learning activities and help students develop conceptual understanding. LAs and LA training programs are becoming increasingly prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) gateway courses in the United States, and research continues to document the positive impacts on students and LAs in LA-facilitated classrooms. While evidence accumulates regarding positive student impact, relatively less work has investigated the ways LAs themselves might also be impacted by their participation in these programs. To improve LA training and student learning in STEM, it is vital that educators better understand the ways the experiences of LAs can promote personal and professional growth as members of the STEM community. To address this gap, we explored the epistemological development of LAs who participated in an LA program (i.e., pedagogy training and classroom practice) at a large, public, teaching-focused university. LAs participated in semi-structured interviews at the beginning and end of the academic term and completed bi-weekly reflections where they described impactful events and challenges. Using qualitative coding, we operationalized Baxter Magolda’s epistemological reflection model to identify the impactful experiences that provoke epistemological development or reorientation. Our findings highlight three impactful experiences that help promote epistemological development for LAs: (i) recognizing the importance of language and listening; (ii) observing more knowledgeable others struggle with content; and (iii) providing students with the “wrong” answer to a question. We argue that these experiences can promote epistemological development in ways that help LAs become more effective in facilitating student learning and, ultimately, more thoughtful members of STEM disciplines. By working to create spaces for LAs to have these impactful experiences in training and preparation, educators can promote epistemological growth in ways that benefit both LAs and the students they serve.

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is a popular multiple-choice instrument used to measure a student’s conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Recently, a network analytic technique called module analysis has been used to identify responses to the FCI and other conceptual instruments that are preferentially selected together by students; these groups of responses are called communities. This study uses module analysis to explore the misconception structure of the FCI at five U.S. institutions with varying undergraduate populations (sample sizes of $N=9606$, 4360, 1496, 466, and 213). Students from these universities had a broad range of prior knowledge in physics and of general high school academic preparation, resulting in large differences in FCI normalized gain, pretest, and post-test scores. In the current work, modified module analysis partial was applied and communities of consistently selected responses within the FCI were identified at the five institutions studied. There was substantial similarity between the communities identified postinstruction; somewhat less similarity preinstruction. This suggests that consistently applied Newtonian misconceptions exist both before and after instruction at a wide range of institutions. The most frequently applied misconceptions were “largest force determines motion,” Newton’s third law misconceptions, and “motion implies active forces.” These misconceptions were still consistently applied even after instruction by a substantial number of students at all but the highest performing of the five institutions.

Optics is a core field in the curricula of secondary physics education. In this study, we present the development and validation of a test instrument in the field of optics, the ray optics in converging lenses concept inventory (ROC-CI). It was developed for and validated with middle school students, but can also be adapted for the use in higher levels of physics education. The ROC-CI can be used as a formative or a summative assessment of students’ conceptual understanding of image formation by converging lenses, assessing the following: (i) the overall understanding of fundamental concepts related to converging lenses, (ii) the understanding of specific concepts, and (iii) students’ propensity for difficulties within this topic. The initial ROC-CI consists of 16 multiple-choice items; however, one item was removed based on various quality checks. We validated the ROC-CI thoroughly with distractor analyses, classical test theory, item response theory, structural analyses, and analyses of students’ total scores at different measurement points as quantitative approaches, as well as student interviews and an expert survey as qualitative approaches. The quantitative analyses are mostly based on a dataset of $N=318$ middle school students who took the ROC-CI as a post-test. The student interviews were conducted with seven middle school students after they were taught the concepts of converging lenses. The expert survey included five experts who evaluated both individual items and the test as a whole. The analyses showed good to excellent results for the test instrument, corroborating the 15-item ROC-CI’s validity and its compliance with the three foci outlined above.

In a partially flipped, hybrid introductory physics course where students had a free choice between attending any lecture session in person or via video conferencing, and where recordings of the lecture sessions were made available for asynchronous viewing, a total of 16 learner attributes and their relationships were investigated. Five of these attributes reflect participation choices, while eleven attributes reflect assessment outcomes on different course components. In line with the “no significant difference phenomenon,” correlations between exam scores and participation choices were weaker than correlations with, for example, prior knowledge as evidenced by pretest scores. Overall, in terms of correlations, participation, and assessment attributes clustered together, respectively, with clicker questions being a connecting attribute between the clusters. Performance aside, we found two populations in the course, which, divided along the line of above and below average in-class attendance, exhibited other distinct behavior attributes mostly related to investment of time and effort in the course.

Laboratory courses are an important part of the undergraduate physics curriculum. During physics labs, students can engage in authentic, hands-on experimental practices, which can prepare them for graduate school, research laboratories, and jobs in industry. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020, colleges and universities across the world rapidly transitioned to teaching labs remotely. In this work, we report results from a survey of physics lab instructors on how they adapted their courses in the transition to emergency remote teaching. We identified three common themes in the instructors’ responses: (i) using a variety of simulation tools, (ii) changing learning goals of the courses to be more concept focused, and (iii) reducing group work due to equity and technological concerns. We discuss the common challenges and successes reported by instructors, which leads to themes and lessons that can impact future remote and in-person instruction.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Over the last decade, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been recognized as a way to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education by engaging students in authentic research practices. One of these authentic practices is participating in teamwork and collaboration, which is increasingly considered to be an important component of undergraduate research experiences and laboratory classes. For example, the American Association of Physics Teachers Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum suggest that one of the goals for students in physics labs should be to develop “interpersonal communication skills” through “teamwork and collaboration.” Teamwork can have tremendous benefits for students, including increased motivation, creativity, and reflection; however, it can also pose an array of new social and environmental challenges, such as differing styles of communication, levels of commitment, and understanding of concepts. It can also be difficult for lab course instructors to evaluate and assess. In this work, we study student teamwork in a large-enrollment physics CURE. The CURE was specifically designed to emphasize teamwork as a scientific practice. We use the two sources of data, the adaptive instrument for regulation of emotions questionnaire and students’ written memos to future researchers, to measure the students’ teamwork goals, challenges, self, co-, and socially shared regulations, and perceived goal attainment. We find that students overwhelmingly achieved their teamwork goals by overcoming obstacles using primarily socially shared regulatory strategies, and that the vast majority of students felt teamwork was an essential part of their research experience. We discuss implications for the design of future CUREs and lab courses and for lab instructors desiring to assess teamwork in their own courses.

Creating equitable learning environments has been an area of significant focus for physics education researchers in recent years. Here we introduce a framework that posits that grade penalty is a measure of academic self-concept and investigate if there are gender differences in grade penalties in physics courses for students majoring in physics. In order to quantify grade penalty, we define grade anomaly as the difference between a student’s grade in a course under consideration and their grade point average (GPA) in all other classes thus far. A grade anomaly lower than students expected grade based on their GPA is a grade penalty and higher than expected average grade is a grade bonus. Our framework posits that since women have traditionally been marginalized in physics, female physics majors are more likely to be negatively impacted by a grade penalty in their courses since their academic self-concept as a physics major hinges on them securing a certain grade. In the study presented here, we examine the average grade anomalies across a number of courses for female and male physics majors. We find that these students received grade penalties in almost all physics courses studied, though there were grade bonuses in a few laboratory courses. We also find that in physics courses, on average, women often had larger grade penalties than men, especially in introductory courses. We hypothesize that, because their grade penalties are often larger than men’s, women’s decisions to pursue a physics major and career may be particularly affected by grade penalties received in their various courses. Furthermore, the grade penalty measure can be easily computed by the physics programs concerned with equity.

Research on student retention in higher education (HE) physics could benefit by studying emotions in the context of engagement and learning. However, popular retention theories include only a narrow selection of emotions, creating a need to look elsewhere. In this study, we borrow the lens of an affective engagement model, the framework of an optimal learning moment, which has rarely been used in HE research so far. It defines situational engagement and three categories of learning enhancing, detracting, or accelerating emotions via twelve singular situational emotions. These twelve emotions in learning and other situations form intensive longitudinal data collected from twenty students using the experience sampling method (ESM) during their first two months of studying physics in a Finnish university. A two-level hierarchical dataset consisting of ESM measures ($N_1=440$) and student records ($N_2=20$), with gender as a background factor, are analyzed in two steps: first with hierarchical linear modeling, followed by multinomial logistic regression, giving results on both levels of the hierarchy, which is quite uncommon still. The results show how situational engagement and learning situations are separately connected to situational emotions and, further, how especially the learning enhancing emotions connect to success in courses (passing, grades) and first year student retention, surpassing the effect of course success.

We analyze the identity trajectory of a single case study, Cassidy, within the physics community. We focus our analysis on two settings in the physics community: an undergraduate research experience, and undergraduate coursework. We use video data from three interviews (spanning roughly fifteen months) to longitudinally analyze shifts in participation. We discuss Cassidy’s experience through two constructs: normative identities, Cassidy’s sense of the valued roles within physics, as well as personal identity, who Cassidy is within the physics community and the extent to which she aligns with normative identities. In attending to shifts in the alignment between personal and normative identities, we identify several entry points, or salient events that open up new opportunities for participation.

Introductory calculus-based mechanics (“Physics 1”) is an important gateway course for students desiring to pursue a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career. A major challenge with this course is the large spread in the students’ incoming physics preparation. This level of preparation is strongly predictive of a students’ performance because of the overlap between Physics 1 and high school physics courses. Because the level of students’ incoming preparation is largely determined by the quality of their high school physics courses, Physics 1 can amplify K–12 educational inequities and be a barrier for marginalized students wishing to pursue a STEM career. Here, we present a novel introductory course design to address this equity challenge. The design and implementation are based on the concept of deliberate practice as applied to learning real-world problem solving. Students explicitly practice research-identified decision-based skills required for problem solving in the context of solving real-world problems. The problems used in the course and their solutions have little resemblance to what students encounter in high school physics, thereby reducing the dependence of course performance on the high school physics preparation. Versions of this course were taught at a highly selective private and a lightly selective public university. The students who took the course learned the physics content knowledge they needed for future courses, particularly in engineering, and their problem-solving skills improved substantially. Furthermore, their course performance had much less correlation with their incoming physics preparation than was the case for the outcomes from the traditional Physics 1 courses at both institutions: in one case the correlation dropped from $r=0.62$ to 0.14, and on the other case the correlation dropped from $r=0.56$ to 0.26. These findings suggest this course design can be a more equitable version of the traditional Physics 1 course, and hence particularly beneficial for marginalized students.

Gender bias, reduced sense of belonging, and lower physics self-efficacy are among the challenges faced by women who choose to study physics. Prior studies focusing on this underrepresented group have examined the experiences and impacts of formal educational settings, leaving the impact of informal physics programs, frequently called outreach programs, as a relatively overlooked area. Existing research on the impact of informal physics programs indicates that student facilitators, who help run the programs, can experience positive impacts on their learning and sense of community beyond the formal setting of a classroom or laboratory. In this study we took a first step, narrowing our focus to explore the relation between facilitation of informal physics programs and female students’ physics identity, persistence, mindset, and worldview. We analyzed a subset of survey responses (32) and interviews (11) with undergraduate and graduate female students collected as part of our prior study. Our analysis of this subset, based on self-reported data, showed a statistically significant shift in confidence of choice of major after facilitating informal physics programs. Analysis of interviews indicated a positive relation between facilitation of informal programs and female student interest and motivation with regards to the field of physics, improved performance and competence beliefs, and the development of characteristics indicative of a growth mindset. A semantic network analysis showed statistically significant interdependencies between positive persistence and constructs including growth mindset, important early undergraduate experiences, gender stereotype threat, external recognition, and confidence.

Physics instruction is often unable to support students’ self-efficacy. The remote teaching brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has also affected learning. We surveyed an introductory quantum mechanics course for three years during a transition into the spin first approach, adapting the student-centered prime-time learning model and using it through the remote teaching during the pandemic. Prime-time learning includes weekly meetings where students and instructors discuss in a small group, and the assessment is based on exercises, group work, and self-assessment. We show that this teaching method improved students’ self-efficacy. Students’ conceptual knowledge post teaching remained high throughout the teaching reform, as measured by an abbreviated Quantum Mechanics Concept Assessment test. We also find that the prime-time model is remarkably stable during remote teaching: in contrast to many other studies, we did not see a decline in conceptual learning outcomes or self-efficacy in remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD) is a fundamental representation in stellar physics. It contains information about key properties of stars and allows inferences about stellar evolution. The use of the HRD is an important disciplinary activity in astrophysics. For example, it is particularly important to have a graphical understanding of the HRD in order to understand elementary astrophysical relationships (e.g., about the luminosity, temperature, radius, and mass of stars). However, several research papers indicate that students often have difficulty interpreting the HRD, apparently due to its visual complexity, and a number of learning difficulties have been described. Yet, there is still no evidence concerning how learners actually select and extract information from the HRD when completing tasks. In this study, we examined the gaze patterns and think-aloud protocols of 35 physics students as they performed 14 open-response tasks. Benchmarking against traditional $x\text{−}y$ diagrams shows that the HRD imposes a significantly higher cognitive load on students, particularly due to the representation of luminosity, magnitude, and spectral class. Students reported a variety of learning difficulties related to information selection and extraction, sometimes mechanistically copying procedures from typical $x\text{−}y$ diagrams. Eye-movement analysis confirmed these learning difficulties on a procedural level and show whether the students fixated on task-relevant parts of the HRD. Based on the study results, preliminary recommendations can be made in order to create engaging learning materials relating to the HRD.

The study of students’ use of representations is one of the main topics of physics education research and is guided by the overarching field of semiotics. In this paper we compare two semiotic frameworks, one coming from didactics of mathematics and one from physics education research; the theory of registers of semiotic representations and social semiotics, using the networking of theories methodology. A group of first year university students were audio and video recorded as they discussed concepts relating to thermal energy, a study that will be further explored in an upcoming paper. We find that analyzing the recorded data using two different semiotic perspectives provides a wider interpretation of students’ representational use, a descriptive approach to how students use the representations, and an approach to the cognitive aspects of the construction of knowledge. By comparing the theoretical constructs they employ, and how they are employed in the analysis process, we identify constructs that both frameworks have in common, but also where they differ. We have found that each semiotic theory provides a different perspective regarding students’ representational use. We also propose that comparing different theories may provide a space for complementing the constructs of each theory and providing a bigger picture to understand students’ representational use in physics and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education areas.

Student difficulties with making sense of graphs in physics have been thoroughly reported. In the study of one-dimensional waves, the issue is even trickier since the amplitude is a function of two variables (position and time). In this work, we investigate students’ reasoning and difficulties with interpreting the graphical representation of the propagation of a pulse in a string. A profile $y(x)$ of the pulse was provided and students were asked to estimate the velocities of several points at the profile. This forced them to consider the time dimension, by focusing their attention on the motion of these points. This turned out to be extremely challenging to the students, who manifested several conceptual challenges which were categorized and analyzed in the first phase of the study. Based on these findings, three levels of scaffolding support were provided, where each level gradually guided the students to draw the wave profile after some time has elapsed. The scaffolding turned out to be effective, since many students managed to identify the new positions of the points successfully. The study reveals how static representations of intrinsically dynamic phenomena can be challenging for students to grasp.