This study investigates how the beliefs and values of physics faculty influence their choice of physics problems for their students in an introductory physics course. The study identifies the goals these instructors have for their students, the problem features they believe facilitate those goals, and how those features correspond to problems they choose to use in their classes. This analysis comes from an artifact-based interview of 30 physics faculty teaching introductory calculus-based physics at a wide variety of institutions. The study concludes that instructors’ goals and the problem features they believe support those goals align with research-based curricular materials intended to develop competent problem solvers. However, many of these instructors do not use the beneficial problem features because they believe these features conflict with a more powerful set of values concerned with clarity of presentation and minimizing student stress, especially on exams.

This paper concerns an empirical study carried out with a group of high school physics teachers engaged in the Module on relativity of a Master course on the teaching of modern physics. The study is framed within the general research issue of how to promote innovation in school via teachers’ education and how to foster fruitful interactions between research and school practice via the construction of networks of researchers and teachers. In the paper, the problems related to innovation are addressed by focusing on the phase during which teachers analyze an innovative teaching proposal in the perspective of designing their own paths for the class work. The proposal analyzed in this study is Taylor and Wheeler’s approach for teaching special relativity. The paper aims to show that the roots of problems known in the research literature about teachers’ difficulties in coping with innovative proposals, and usually related to the implementation process, can be found and addressed already when teachers approach the proposal and try to appropriate it. The study is heuristic and has been carried out in order to trace the “appropriation path,” followed by the group of teachers, in terms of the main steps and factors triggering the progressive evolution of teachers’ attitudes and competences.

To determine whether teaching an introductory physics course with a traditional lecture style or with Just-in-Time teaching (a student-centered, interactive-engagement style) will help students to better understand Newtonian concepts, such as Newton’s Third Law, 222 students in introductory physics courses taught by traditional lecture styles and Just-in-Time teaching at North Georgia College & State University over the span of five semesters were examined using the Force Concept Inventory as a pretest and a post-test. Overall, the gains favor the Just-in-Time teaching method with a $37.6\mathrm{\%}\pm 2.0\mathrm{\%}$ gain compared to the $17.9\mathrm{\%}\pm 2.5\mathrm{\%}$ seen in traditional lecture classes. When analyzing only those gains pertaining to the Newton’s Third Law questions, the results again favor the Just-in-Time teaching method with a gain of $50.8\mathrm{\%}\pm 4.1\mathrm{\%}$ while the traditional lecture classes only saw a gain of $6.6\mathrm{\%}\pm 5.2\mathrm{\%}$. We also employed a new method of analysis which was a BIT Coding method created to quickly identify students’ understanding of Newton’s Third Law questions. This study shows that students in courses that are taught using the Just-in-Time teaching strategy better understand Newton’s Third Law after instruction than do students in traditional lecture courses.

A mathematical theory of peer instruction describing the increase of the normalized number of correct answers due to peer discussion is presented. A simple analytic expression is derived which agrees with class data. It is shown that our theory is connected to the mathematical learning models proposed by Pritchard et al. It is also shown that obtained theoretical lines are useful for analyzing peer-instruction efficiencies.

This work is an attempt to see how physics undergraduates view the basic ideas of general relativity when they are exposed to the topic in a standard introductory course. Since the subject is conceptually and technically difficult, we adopted a “case studies” approach, focusing in depth on about six students who had just finished a one semester course on special relativity. The methodology of investigation involved a combination of text comprehension questionnaire and detailed clinical interviews. The aim was not to investigate the technical proficiency of the students, but to probe in detail the nuances of their conceptions of several basic points of the subject. Analysis of their responses reveals a large number of “alternative conceptions” of students in the domain. The study should be useful to physics education researchers as well as to teachers of introductory general relativity at about the senior undergraduate level.

Students often make mistakes in physics courses and are expected to identify, correct, and learn from their mistakes, usually with some assistance from an instructor, textbook, or fellow students. This aid may come in many forms, such as problem solutions that are given to a class, tutoring to an individual student, or a peer discussion among several students. However, in each case a student relies upon an external agent in order to determine whether, and how, her work is mistaken. Consequently, the student’s learning process is largely contingent upon the availability and quality of external evaluating agents. One may suspect that if a student developed the ability to evaluate her own work, her dependence on external agents could be moderated and result in an enhancement of her learning. This paper presents the results of a study investigating the impact of novel activities that aim to teach students when, why, and how to use the strategies of unit analysis and special-case analysis. The data indicate that it is possible to help students dramatically improve their understanding of each strategy, and that this has a significant impact on problem-solving performance.

We examine the pedagogical suitability of introducing a teaching sequence for the concept of electrical capacitance within the context of charging a body. This short sequence targets first year university students and was designed following students’ common conceptions on this topic. The evaluation is made by comparing the results with a control group using written questionnaires. The results show that the elements within the sequence help students to establish a connection between the movement of charges (microframe) and the energetic analysis of the system (macroframe).

In prior research, the classification of concepts into three types—descriptive, hypothetical and theoretical—has allowed for the association of students’ use of different concept types with their level of understanding. Previous studies have also examined the ways in which students link concepts to determine whether students have a meaningful understanding of principles of evolution. In this study, we build on our previous work that seeks to examine how students use prior knowledge in new situations and context, as well as present an adaptation of concept and concept-link categorization previously used in biology education research. In this adaptation, concepts are categorized on the basis of the observability of the concept exemplars and are shown to be dependent upon the knowledge level of the student. We use this categorization method to examine how students use prior knowledge when presented with an opportunity to apply physics in a new context, namely, wavefront aberrometry. Results indicate that students primarily utilize lower-level concepts, which is in agreement with previous research findings. We also found that students are able to create links between different levels of concepts, and that the type of links created can give insight to how deeply they understood the physics of the new context.

It is known that introductory physics students rarely, if ever, read the textbook prior to coming to lecture. In this study, we report results from a curriculum intervention in a large enrollment introductory physics class that addresses this problem. In particular, we introduced web-based multimedia learning modules (MLMs) as a “prelecture assignment” designed to better prepare students before coming to lecture. We used student performance on “preflight questions” that they answer prior to lecture as a measure of their before-lecture understanding of the physics concepts. We found significant improvement in student performance and on the vast majority of these preflight questions as compared to that from previous semesters in which MLMs were not available. We found significant improvement for all students, independent of their background or ability level.

An individual’s motivational orientation serves as a drive to action and can influence their career success. This study examines how goal orientation toward the pursuit of a graduate degree in physics and chemistry influences later success outcomes of practicing physicists and chemists. Two main categories of goal orientation are examined in this paper: performance orientation or motivation to demonstrate one’s ability or performance to others, and learning orientation or motivation through the desire to learn about a topic. The data were obtained as part of Project Crossover, a mixed-methods study which focused on studying the transition from graduate student to scientist in the physical sciences and included a survey of members of two national professional physical science organizations. Using regression analysis on data from 2353 physicists and chemists, results indicate that physicists and chemists who reported a learning orientation as their motivation for going to graduate school were more productive, in terms of total career primary and/or first-author publications and grant funding, than those reporting a performance orientation. Furthermore, given equal salary, learning-oriented individuals produced more primary and/or first-author publications than their nonlearning oriented counterparts.

We report the results of a five year evaluation of the reform of introductory calculus-based physics by implementation of Modeling Instruction (MI) at Florida International University (FIU), a Hispanic-serving institution. MI is described in the context of FIU’s overall effort to enhance student participation in physics and science broadly. Our analysis of MI from a “participationist” perspective on learning identifies aspects of MI including conceptually based instruction, culturally sensitive instruction, and cooperative group learning, which are consistent with research on supporting equitable learning and participation by students historically under-represented in physics (i.e., Black, Hispanic, women). This study uses markers of conceptual understanding as measured by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and odds of success as measured by the ratio of students completing introductory physics and earning a passing grade (i.e., $\text{C}-$ or better) by students historically under-represented in physics to reflect equity and participation in introductory physics. FCI pre and post scores for students in MI are compared with lecture-format taught students. Modeling Instruction students outperform students taught in lecture-format classes on post instruction FCI (61.9% vs 47.9%, $p<0.001$), where these benefits are seen across both ethnic and gender comparisons. In addition, we report that the odds of success in MI are 6.73 times greater than in lecture instruction. Both odds of success and FCI scores within Modeling Instruction are further disaggregated by ethnicity and by gender to address the question of equity within the treatment. The results of this disaggregation indicate that although ethnically under-represented students enter with lower overall conceptual understanding scores, the gap is not widened during introductory physics but instead is maintained, and the odds of success for under-represented students is not different from majority students. Women, similarly enter with scores indicating lower conceptual understanding, and over the course of MI this understanding gap increases, yet we do not find differences in the odds of success between men and women. Contrasting these results with the participationist view on learning indicates a movement toward greater equity in introductory physics but also indicates that the instructional environment can be improved.

As part of a long-term program to develop effective, research-based professional development programs for physics graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), we first identify their current classroom practices and why they engage in these practices. In this paper, we identify a set of teaching practices we call “focusing on indicators,” which occurs when TAs use signs such as key words or diagrams as evidence that students understand the target idea; these indicators are more superficial than a detailed explanation. Our primary finding is that although the three TAs discussed here share a common behavior, the beliefs and motivations that underlie this behavior vary. We argue that TA professional development focused on changing these TAs’ focus-on-indicator behavior is unlikely to be effective. Instead, responsive TA professional development will need to address the TAs’ beliefs that guide the observed classroom behavior.

Submissions to an online homework tutor were analyzed to determine whether they were copied. The fraction of copied submissions increased rapidly over the semester, as each weekly deadline approached and for problems later in each assignment. The majority of students, who copied less than 10% of their problems, worked steadily over the three days prior to the deadline, whereas repetitive copiers (those who copied $>30\mathrm{\%}$ of their submitted problems) exerted little effort early. Importantly, copying homework problems that require an analytic answer correlates with a $2\left(\sigma \right)$ decline over the semester in relative score for similar problems on exams but does not significantly correlate with the amount of conceptual learning as measured by pretesting and post-testing. An anonymous survey containing questions used in many previous studies of self-reported academic dishonesty showed $\sim 1/3$ less copying than actually was detected. The observed patterns of copying, free response questions on the survey, and interview data suggest that time pressure on students who do not start their homework in a timely fashion is the proximate cause of copying. Several measures of initial ability in math or physics correlated with copying weakly or not at all. Changes in course format and instructional practices that previous self-reported academic dishonesty surveys and/or the observed copying patterns suggested would reduce copying have been accompanied by more than a factor of 4 reduction of copying from $\sim 11\mathrm{\%}$ of all electronic problems to less than 3%. As expected (since repetitive copiers have approximately three times the chance of failing), this was accompanied by a reduction in the overall course failure rate. Survey results indicate that students copy almost twice as much written homework as online homework and show that students nationally admit to more academic dishonesty than MIT students.

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is an important diagnostic instrument which is widely used in the field of physics education research. It is therefore very important to evaluate and monitor its functioning using different tools for statistical analysis. One of such tools is the stochastic Rasch model, which enables construction of linear measures for persons and items from raw test scores and which can provide important insight in the structure and functioning of the test (how item difficulties are distributed within the test, how well the items fit the model, and how well the items work together to define the underlying construct). The data for the Rasch analysis come from the large-scale research conducted in 2006-07, which investigated Croatian high school students’ conceptual understanding of mechanics on a representative sample of 1676 students (age 17–18 years). The instrument used in research was the FCI. The average FCI score for the whole sample was found to be $\left(27.7\pm 0.4\right)\mathrm{\%}$, indicating that most of the students were still non-Newtonians at the end of high school, despite the fact that physics is a compulsory subject in Croatian schools. The large set of obtained data was analyzed with the Rasch measurement computer software WINSTEPS 3.66. Since the FCI is routinely used as pretest and post-test on two very different types of population (non-Newtonian and predominantly Newtonian), an additional predominantly Newtonian sample ($N=141$, average FCI score of 64.5%) of first year students enrolled in introductory physics course at University of Zagreb was also analyzed. The Rasch model based analysis suggests that the FCI has succeeded in defining a sufficiently unidimensional construct for each population. The analysis of fit of data to the model found no grossly misfitting items which would degrade measurement. Some items with larger misfit and items with significantly different difficulties in the two samples of students do require further examination. The analysis revealed some problems with item distribution in the FCI and suggested that the FCI may function differently in non-Newtonian and predominantly Newtonian population. Some possible improvements of the test are suggested.

We present a measure, which we have named the Pedagogical Expectancy Violation Assessment (PEVA), for instructors to gauge one aspect of the success of their implementation of pedagogical reform by assessing the expectations and experiences of the students in the classroom. We implemented the PEVA in four physics classes at three institutions that used the Student Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) pedagogy in order to gain an understanding of students’ initial expectations, how those expectations are shifted during early classes, and what students report experiencing at the end of the semester. The results indicate appropriate shifts in student expectations during orientation, but some gaps between student expectations and experiences persisted. Students rated the communication aspects of SCALE-UP as desirable and indicated an overall positive affect toward the pedagogy, indicating that violations of their initial expectations were largely positive. By studying the patterns of the shifts in students’ expectations and gaps between those expectations and their experiences, we gain insight for improving both the orientation of the students and the implementation of the course.

Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we document variations in instructional approaches with respect to interpretation in two similar modern physics courses recently taught at the University of Colorado, and examine associated impacts on student perspectives regarding quantum physics. We find students are more likely to prefer realist interpretations of quantum-mechanical systems when instructors are less explicit in addressing student ontologies. We also observe contextual variations in student beliefs about quantum systems, indicating that instructors who choose to address questions of ontology in quantum mechanics should do so explicitly across a range of topics.

We have investigated the long-term effect of student-centered instruction at the freshman level on juniors’ performance on a conceptual survey of Electricity and Magnetism (E&M). We measured student performance on a research-based conceptual instrument—the Brief Electricity & Magnetism Assessment (BEMA)–over a period of 8 semesters (2004–2007). Concurrently, we introduced the University of Washington's Tutorials in Introductory Physics as part of our standard freshman curriculum. Freshmen took the BEMA before and after this Tutorial-based introductory course, and juniors took it after completion of their traditional junior-level E&M I and E&M II courses. We find that, on average, individual BEMA scores do not change significantly after completion of the introductory course—neither from the freshman to the junior year, nor from upper-division E&M I to E&M II. However, we find that juniors who had completed a non-Tutorial freshman course scored significantly lower on the (post-upper-division) BEMA than those who had completed the reformed freshman course—indicating a long-term positive impact of freshman Tutorials on conceptual understanding.

Successful implementation of tutorials includes establishing norms for learning in the tutorial classroom. The teaching assistants (TAs) who lead each tutorial section are important arbiters of these norms. TAs who value (buy into) tutorials are more likely to convey their respect for the material and the tutorial process to the students, as well as learning more themselves. We present a case study of a TA who does not buy into certain aspects of the tutorials he teaches and demonstrate how his lack of buy-in affects specific classroom interactions. We would hope to design professional development programs to help TAs appreciate the power of tutorial instruction. However, our research suggests that the typical professional development activities offered to tutorial TAs are not likely to be effective. Instead, it appears that what we call the “social and environmental context” of the tutorials—including classroom, departmental, and institutional levels of implementation—has the potential to strongly affect TA buy-in to tutorials and probably outweighs the influence of any particular activity that we might prepare for them.

Developing expertise in physics entails learning to use mathematics effectively and efficiently as applied to the context of physical situations. Doing so involves coordinating a variety of concepts and skills including mathematical processing, computation, blending ancillary information with the math, and reading out physical implications from the math and vice versa. From videotaped observations of intermediate level students solving problems in groups, we note that students often “get stuck” using a limited group of skills or reasoning and fail to notice that a different set of tools (which they possess and know how to use effectively) could quickly and easily solve their problem. We refer to a student’s perception or judgment of the kind of knowledge that is appropriate to bring to bear in a particular situation as epistemological framing. Although epistemological framing is often unstated (and even unconscious), in group problem-solving situations students sometimes get into disagreements about how to progress. During these disagreements, they bring forth reasons or warrants in support of their point of view. For the context of mathematics use in physics problem solving, we present a system for classifying physics students’ warrants and analyze a case study. This warrant analysis provides a general widely applicable technique for identifying students’ epistemological framings.