This theoretical paper defines and explores the concepts of transductive links and transductive chains, as part of the theoretical framework of social semiotics. Social semiotics stems from the multimodal framework, which provides a theoretical perspective, constructs, and a language to describe a shift of semiotic material within or between semiotic systems, such as rewriting a text or moving from a function to a plot. Within this framework a shift of semiotic material between two such systems is referred to as a transduction. This paper aims to expand on the concept of transduction by identifying a theoretical contribution to the modeling of this process, referred to as a transductive link. This link is suggested to affect the transduction process and the resulting learning experience. For example, when plotting measurement data, a computer program can be employed to read the data and to transform the data into pixel information. In this case, programming, or the act of programming, acts as a link between the two resources in the transduction process—a transductive link. In other cases, multiple transductions can be performed one after another resulting in these links creating what we define as a transductive chain. By observing and analyzing the use of different semiotic systems in different learning situations, transductive links and chains can be identified and examined. From this identification one has the possibility to find weak links in the transductive chain and address them accordingly. As such, we suggest that transductive links and chains are powerful tools to be able to understand students’ learning experiences.

Upper-division physics students solve partial differential equations in various contexts in quantum mechanics courses. Separation of variables is a standard technique to solve these equations. We investigated students’ solutions to midterm exam questions and utilized think-aloud interviews. We also applied a framework that organizes students’ problem-solving process into four stages: activate, construct, execute, and reflect. Here we focused on students’ problem-solving process for two typical problems in the context of quantum mechanics: an energy eigenfunction problem in two spatial dimensions and a time evolution problem in one spatial dimension. We found that the students encountered various difficulties when they used the separation of variables technique to solve these partial differential equations. Common difficulties included recognizing when separation of variables is the appropriate method, deriving the correct separated equations from the original equation, deciding the signs of the separation constants, justifying when using the summation form of the wave function, and using an effective reflecting tool for their final solutions. In addition, we observed qualitatively and quantitatively different errors in students’ solutions to the two problems. Finally, we discussed the possible implications of our findings for instruction.

Physics lab instruction is evolving in response to changing technology, a desire to better prepare students for diverse careers, and renewed focus from physics education researchers. To prepare researchers to evaluate progress in instructional labs in the future, this study set out to understand the current state of instructional physics labs in North America. Using information collected from instructors intending to use two research-based lab assessments, we evaluate the reach, organization, goals, and pedagogies from over 200 unique instructional lab courses at over 100 institutions. We find significant diversity in all aspects evaluated, with some trends in course pedagogy based on course goals and level. Namely, courses that aim to reinforce concepts, develop lab skills, or do both incorporate varied levels of agency and modeling in their instruction, with differences in first year and beyond-first year courses. We hope these analyses will be useful for instructors to situate their own courses in the national landscape and for researchers to evaluate changes in lab instruction in the future.

Scientific writing, in the form of lab notebooks, proposals, and reports, is a common element of physics lab classes. Multiweek student-designed projects are growing in popularity, especially in advanced lab courses, and writing may play a unique role in these types of courses. In prior work, we developed a framework of possible goals for writing in physics lab classes. Here, we use that framework as a lens through which to view three different advanced lab courses that include student-designed projects. We conduct a multiple case-study analysis to investigate how these courses incorporate writing to address various goals. We find that both the timescale and the open-ended nature of projects present unique opportunities for having students engage in authentic writing practices.

Physics lab courses are integral parts of an undergraduate physics education, and offer a variety of opportunities for learning. Many of these opportunities center around a common learning goal in introductory physics lab courses: measurement uncertainty. Accordingly, when the stand-alone introductory lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) was recently transformed, measurement uncertainty was the focus of a learning goal of that transformation. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ), a research-based assessment of student understanding around statistical measurement uncertainty, was used to measure the effectiveness of that transformation. Here, we analyze student responses to the PMQ at the beginning and end of the CU course. We also compare such responses from two semesters: one before and one after the transformation. We present evidence that students in both semesters shifted their reasoning in ways aligned with the measurement uncertainty learning goal. Furthermore, we show that more students in the transformed semester shifted in ways aligned with the learning goal, and that those students tended to communicate their reasoning with greater sophistication than students in the original course. These findings provide evidence that even a traditional lab course can support valuable learning, and that transforming such a course to align with well-defined learning goals can result in even more effective learning experiences.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In developing and modifying a course called Intuitive Quantum Physics for nonscience majors, several social and theoretical commitments informed our design decisions. We believed that the goal of a general education course should not be acquiring content knowledge alone, but more generally developing an approach to thinking scientifically. Thus, our course was designed to promote a deeper understanding of the nature of science through careful attention to students’ personal epistemologies. We emphasized everyday situations, be they social activities or personal experiences, as analogies to be used during instruction. We used these everyday events to help students make sense of quantum physics, choosing the topic exactly because it seems otherwise counterintuitive. Through this work, we hoped to help students make connections between complex topics (in this case in science) and their everyday experiences.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] When disseminating curricula, typically only the physical curriculum materials are transferred from the instructor to another. However, left as artifacts in the curricula are a set of epistemological beliefs held by the creators and designers of the materials. These epistemological beliefs are often underpinning the activity structures and strongly influence how the curriculum materials are implemented in the classroom, particularly when those beliefs differ from those activated by the instructor. In this paper, we articulate three epistemological beliefs that are built into the University Modeling Instruction curriculum that are essential for running the large-group discussions, which are a crucial part of the curriculum. We highlight how these beliefs are built into the student-facing and instructor-facing curricular materials and the influence of these beliefs in the interpretation and implementation of the curriculum materials. Finally, we discuss the implications on curriculum dissemination, on the adoption and adaptation of curriculum materials, and training models for instructors beyond the curriculum designers.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Common models of curricular development in physics education research (PER) have typically involved a hierarchical relationship between researchers and students, where researchers lead the design and testing of curriculum for students. We draw from work in students as partners and related fields in order to codesign curriculum in partnership with students. Such work has the potential to disrupt typical hierarchical relationships and interactions between students and faculty by involving students in the process of making curricular decisions. We invited undergraduate students to participate in a partnership to codesign a set of curricular materials for topics in quantum mechanics that students often struggle with. Four undergraduate students, one PER graduate student, and one PER faculty member met for a series of codesign meetings. We collected videotapes of the meetings, written artifacts, and meeting reflections. This paper presents a fine-grained analysis of one interaction in which researchers attempted to create space for students to contribute to decision making about how the collaboration should proceed. Through analyzing the complex dynamics of how participants negotiated decision-making space, including characterizing the types of decisions that were made, we describe how access to those decisions were opened up or cut off, and how those decisions contested or reaffirmed participants’ roles. Working towards partnership is a complex and messy process: attempts to open up space for some forms of decision making closed off access to other forms of decision making. In some ways, the interactions between the participants also reified the traditional student and faculty roles that the partnership had intended to disrupt. Through closely analyzing these dynamics, we aim to self-critically reflect on the challenges and tensions that emerge in codesign partnerships. We discuss our own areas for growth and speak to implications for more responsible partnerships.

A growing body of research-based instructional materials for quantum mechanics has been developed in recent years. Despite a common grounding in the research literature on student ideas about quantum mechanics, there are some major differences between the various sets of instructional materials. In this article, we examine the major instructional considerations that influenced the development of two comprehensive quantum mechanics curricula: Paradigms in Physics (the junior-level physics courses at Oregon State University) and Tutorials in Physics: Quantum Mechanics (a set of supplementary worksheets designed at the University of Washington). The instructional considerations that we consider vary in nature: some are philosophical or theoretical commitments about teaching and learning, while some are practical structures determined in part by the local instructional environments. We then use these instructional considerations as a lens to explore example activities from each curriculum and to highlight prominent differences between them, along with some underlying reasons for those differences. The Paradigms reflect a case where the theoretical commitments drove changes to the practical structures while the Tutorials reflect how theoretical commitments were incorporated into a course with a relatively fixed practical structure. Partially as a result of this large-scale difference, we find that each curriculum prioritizes different theoretical commitments about how to promote student understanding of quantum mechanics. We discuss instances of both alignment and tension between the theoretical commitments of the two curricula and their impact on the instructional materials.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Fifteen years ago, following recommendations from research on science education for prospective teachers and for students more broadly, Physics and Everyday Thinking introduced activities within an inquiry-based undergraduate physics course that explicitly focus on the nature of science and nature of learning. This component of the curriculum is referred to as learning about learning. Since then, this same team developed a series of other curricula. These later curricula, Physics and Everyday Thinking (2nd ed.), Physical Science and Everyday Thinking, Learning Physics, Learning Physical Science, and Next Generation Physical Science and Everyday Thinking all retain a focus on learning about learning as a priority. While similar theoretical grounding guided development across all these curricula, this particular component evolved considerably. These changes were motivated by practical considerations, developments in research, changes to the K-12 expectations, and changes in physics departments, as well as changes to the team. We introduce the term responsive curriculum development to describe the changes made to this aspect of the curricula. With responsive curriculum development, the development process is responsive to contextual, social, and policy factors so that the materials remain relevant and adaptable in diverse contexts and time periods.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The overarching goal of this paper is to illustrate the interplay between theory, design principles, and curriculum (meant broadly, to include both written and enacted curriculum). This dialogue is illustrated in the context of the design and implementation of a particular curricular unit on thermodynamics intended for advanced secondary students in Italy. The approach to the discipline and design of learning materials that we take in this work challenges a conventional view of physics disciplinary content as hierarchically organized and instead promotes a multidimensional and thematically organized physics curriculum. In this paper, we emphasize not only the influence of theory on design, but also the reverse influence: how the analysis of specific classroom data from enactments of a designed curriculum can contribute to refining and building a local theory of how to learn and teach physics in a way that is inclusive and responsive to classroom diversity.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Developing a solid understanding of simple electric circuits represents a major challenge to most students in middle school. In particular, students tend to reason exclusively with current and resistance when analyzing electric circuits as they view voltage as a property of the electric current and not an independent physical quantity. As a result, they often struggle to understand the important relationship between voltage and current in electric circuits. Following diSessa’s interpretation of learning as the construction and reorganization of previously loosely connected elements of knowledge (“p-prims”) into a coherent mental structure (“coordination class”), a new curriculum was developed that systematically builds on students’ everyday experiences with air pressure (e.g., with air mattresses and bicycle tires). In order to make voltage rather than current the students’ primary concept when analyzing electric circuits, voltage is introduced as an “electric pressure difference” across a resistor that is as much the cause for an electric current as air pressure differences are the cause for air flow. The objective of the curriculum is to provide a structure for students to develop a qualitative understanding of simple dc circuits that allows them to make intuitive inferences about the electric current based on voltage and resistance. With an effect size of $d=0.94$ the new curriculum has proven to be more effective than traditional approaches for teaching electric circuits in a quasi-experimental field study with 790 students from Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Although curriculum design has a long tradition in physics education research (PER), it is often criticized for unclear or inconsistent methodologies. One reason is that the theory-into-practice aspect frequently remains blurred. Only a few curriculum projects have given insight into the rule-guided translation of learning theories into curricula and curriculum materials. This paper reports how design-based research (DBR) was used as a framework for systematic curriculum development during a six-year-long project on a middle school optics curriculum. One key feature of DBR is to deduce design principles from theoretical and empirical foundations, apply them in the creation of a curriculum, and refine them in response to data collected during successions of implementation. The design principles guide and structure the iterative cycles of design—intervention—redesign and make a systematic and nevertheless flexible design process transparent. We provide the level of detail needed to make clear how design principles were developed and applied in the creation of the optics curriculum. In addition, we use many examples to illustrate how and why the initial set of design principles was refined. We report the results of a large scale evaluation of the curriculum that shows its superiority to conventional instruction. Finally, we summarize the lessons learned during this project. This shall support other scholars in designing and implementing curricula.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In the “standard” physics education research curriculum-development model, researchers are cast primarily as producers of curricula and instructors are cast primarily consumers, i.e., adopters and adapters. We illustrate a complementary model in which researchers’ curricular modules, and also their “pure” research unattached to curriculum development, can serve as instructionally generative fodder that inspires and loosely guides instructors in creating their own curricular materials. Drawing on experiences from our graduate student days, we show how particular curricula and research papers influenced our curriculum development and instruction in particular ways. We then argue that the physics education ecosystem could benefit if researchers were more intentional about creating potential instructionally generative fodder, and we suggest ways to do so. Although not intended to replace the standard curriculum-development model, which has a history of producing effective tutorials and other curricular modules, our alternative model casts the researcher and instructor as co-equal contributors to the research-based yet creative process of curriculum generation.

The goals for lab instruction are receiving critical attention in the physics education community due to multiple reports and research findings. In this paper, we describe a theoretically motivated scheme to evaluate instructional lab curricula and apply that scheme to three implementations of an electricity and magnetism lab curriculum. The scheme has three components: (1) that critical thinking is a context-dependent process for using critical thinking skills to make evidence-based decisions (2) that to make decisions one must have agency and (3) that deliberate practice can be used to effectively teach critical thinking skills. We use this scheme to evaluate the lab instructions for three sets of instructional labs for their use of deliberate practice for teaching critical thinking skills through varied opportunities for students to exercise agency in making decisions about experiments. Our analysis shows that our curricular design did target the experimentation-focused critical thinking skills, but did not strongly align with theoretical recommendations for deliberate practice. The results provide suggestions for improvements to curricular design. For curriculum developers, instructors, and researchers who intend to teach critical thinking in the context of experimental physics, this scheme serves as a tool to create and evaluate lab instructions in terms of the ways in which specific skills are supported through deliberate practice.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] We argue that teaching learning sequence (TLS) design needs to be further developed through the explicit articulation of methodology, which comprises the theoretical commitments regarding research and how those give rise to methods for design, implementation and assessment. In this study we propose design based research (DBR) as a methodology to conduct systematic and iterative studies of the design and assessment of educational interventions (such as materials and strategies) as solutions to complex problems in educational practice. This methodology does not specify theoretical commitments regarding the nature of learning and how those give rise to teaching strategies, but the articulation of those commitments is expected as part of the justification for decision making in the design process. In order to demonstrate the framework, we present an example of TLS development in the context of introductory electrostatics and dc circuits. We describe the evaluation of the TLS over three years of implementation, addressing both the capacity of the TLS for involving students in learning the topic and the students’ learning itself.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This paper discusses the theoretical framework and curriculum materials that form the basis of the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach to learning and teaching physics. ISLE, as a philosophical approach to learning, has two core intentionalities: (i) We want students to learn physics by thinking like physicists; by engaging in knowledge-generating activities that mimic the actual practices of physics and using the reasoning tools that physicists use when constructing and applying knowledge. (ii) The way in which students learn physics should enhance their well being. These intentionalities form the basis upon which we build a bricolage of multiple theoretical perspectives. We will show how the ISLE approach and its implementation is shaped by (a) the epistemological commitments of physics, (b) the findings of cognitive science, (c) theories of learning communities, and (d) the perspective of universal design. We will present both qualitative and quantitative data that demonstrate the effectiveness of ISLE in helping students to achieve our intentionalities. We conclude with a call to curriculum developers and implementers to explicitly articulate their intentionalities and theoretical perspectives so that we may forge deeper connections between educational theories, curriculum development, and implementation.

This article describes the redesign of a project-based course on soft and biological materials to include computational modeling. Including the construction of computational models in the course is described as a shift from constructivism—a theory that characterizes the development of formal reasoning, to constructionism—a theory that focuses on learning while constructing artifacts. This shift ameliorated two drawbacks in the original course: the limited conceptualization of entropy resulting from an unproductive use of the disorder metaphor, and the dependence of most students on the teacher for writing theoretical explanations for their final papers. In the redesigned curriculum, computer simulations provide concrete dynamic representations that students can draw upon for developing nuanced, formal reasoning on entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. In addition, core computational models act as a flexible web that can be extended and modified, and allow a significant proportion of the students to build theoretical models on their own. We conclude that while the new design reflects a shift towards constructionism, we did not adopt a fully constructionist approach, rather a blend of constructivist and constructionist approaches.

This empirical study investigates the main features of curricula and contexts that favor or hinder the process of transfer of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) from the designers’ original situation to a host one. The specific research questions addressed were (RQ1) what were the changes made during the process of transfer in the new context? (RQ2) What were the similarities or differences between the national curricula and contexts that influenced the process of transfer? To answer our research questions, we chose two TLSs, one about optical properties of materials, the other about thermal conductivity, originally designed by two groups of researchers and experienced teachers in Italy and Greece, respectively. The transfer process was analyzed using the “adaptation and reinvention” model, originally developed for the management knowledge research field, while the construct of “institutional distance” was used to describe the influence of country-specific aspects on the transfer process. Data collected included background documents that describe the principles underlying the TLSs design, the decisions and changes made to the original TLSs by the hosting group, and reports on the TLS implementation in classroom practice in the original and in the host context. Content analysis was used to analyze data. Results show that the similarities between the two national curricula and interactions between the involved groups acted mainly as facilitators of the transfer process.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] A level of curricular design, called design tactics, is identified to fill a gap in the research literature between the broad principles that guide curriculum development and the detailed writing of specific activities and lessons. The use of design tactics is illustrated with a case study using a sequence from middle-division undergraduate electromagnetism, the ring cycle, developed as part of the Paradigms in Physics project at Oregon State University. A retrospective analysis of the curriculum development process identified ten design tactics, related to content, sensemaking, and classroom practice. Further analysis of secondary implementations at DePaul University and California State University San Marcos illustrates how design tactics can also be used to make adaptations to local settings and contexts. Design tactics can serve as a productive bridge between higher-level design principles and activity development.