Belonging in a discipline or department is an important aspect of people’s persistence in that discipline or department, especially for undergraduate students. Previous research has shown that increasing student feelings of belonging in a department benefits all students and is even more valuable for women, racialized people, and other underrepresented groups. However, helping students to develop feelings of belonging can be difficult and complex. This article presents data from a larger, primarily qualitative case study that was conducted at a research-based university in Canada. It examines how a group of faculty, staff, and students worked toward building community and cultivating belonging in their physics department. The aspects of this process that the professor and student participants experienced, and the challenges and rewards encountered, are described and explained here. Some of the strategies that professor participants undertook were relatively easily accomplished using what we describe here as a “classical” paradigm; the analogy is to the traditional physics culture. One example of a strategy employed under the classical paradigm is hosting a mentoring program for physics majors. Other strategies were quite challenging for many professor participants and required a paradigm shift toward more progressive views, which, following the analogy, we call a “quantum” paradigm. An example is believing and behaving as though students with B grades belong and can succeed in physics. We suggest that the paradigm shift from classical (traditional thinking) to quantum (progressive) is an important barrier that members of the physics community must recognize and overcome to fully address student participation and experiences in physics, although some changes were still possible without making the paradigm shift. The study found a new difference between feeling welcome and feeling a sense of belonging among students, as well as a similar difference among faculty members. We present possible steps that physics faculty and staff may consider along the road to recruitment and retention in physics, which are notable for departments and instructors interested in improving student outcomes, departmental sustainability, and equity, diversity, and inclusion.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Instructors teaching upper-division quantum mechanics have had two primary options when it comes to textbook choice and thus curriculum sequence: starting with wave functions and the Schrödinger equation, referred to as “wave functions-first;” and starting with discrete spin-$1/2$ systems and Dirac notation, known as “spins-first” courses. Given the very different structures of these courses, particularly as it pertains to the notations and formalisms both emphasized and used, it begs the question as to whether and to what extent students in these different courses conceptualize symbolic expressions in Dirac and wave function notations differently. To investigate this, online surveys were administered to students in spins-first courses at six institutions and in wave functions-first courses at four institutions. As a follow-up to a prior study focused on the results from the spins-first courses, network analysis and community detection techniques were used to compare the level of conceptual similarity between expressions as viewed by the students in both curricula. Conceptual interpretations of individual expressions in both Dirac and wave function notations were also directly compared between the two populations. The primary difference observed between the two populations appears to lie in the way they interpret Dirac bras and kets: spins-first students were found to more strongly connect these expressions to vectorlike interpretations, while wave functions-first students were found to interpret them as more wave functionlike. This suggests that the choice of text and/or curricular style should be informed by the interpretation that best matches the goals of the instructor.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Quantum information science and technology is a growing field. Programs like Quantum Flagship in the EU and the National Quantum Initiative Act in the U.S. have called for science education and science education research to provide efforts and competencies for preparing the workforce and the next generations of quantum experts and promoting quantum literacy. The second quantum revolution is similar to the Newtonian one in that it has the potential to question worldviews in our society. We present our approach to design a teaching module for secondary school students that aims to value the cultural scope of the second quantum revolution. The model of educational reconstruction was used as a theoretical reference to reconstruct content for educational and cultural purposes. Renn’s elaborated historical analysis of knowledge evolution provided the criteria for characterizing the cultural scope in content reconstruction. The module has been iteratively refined following a design-based approach involving back-and-forth dynamics between educational hypotheses and empirical results. The process started in 2018, and the module was refined through 5 rounds of implementation in extracurricular courses with secondary school students (for almost 130 students). The main finding underscores the importance of finding a balance between a process of simplification or elementarization of the content and its enrichment to foster learners to develop a deep understanding of quantum technologies, their conceptual intricacies, and their cultural scope.

Problem solving is considered an essential ability for becoming an expert in physics, and individualized feedback on the structure of problem-solving processes is a key component to support students in developing this ability. Problem-solving processes consist of multiple elements whose order forms the sequential structure of these processes. Specific sequential structures can be expected to better reflect expert problem solving and more likely lead to successful solutions. However, this sequential structure often receives limited attention in assessments, thereby neglecting possibly valuable diagnostic information that could be used for individualized feedback. Consequently, a deeper understanding of the sequential structure of students’ written physics problem-solving approaches could leverage novel potentials for physics instruction and feedback provision. This study therefore aimed to examine how the sequential structure of written problem-solving approaches differs between high- and low-performing problem solvers as well as to what extent specific sequential elements are predictive of problem-solving performance. To achieve this, we employed methods from process mining and sequence analysis research. Our findings revealed that low-performing problem solvers often lack structure in their problem-solving approaches, contrasting with notably more systematic approaches of the high-performing problem solvers. Additionally, the order in which assumptions and conceptual aspects are addressed in a problem-solving approach seems to be an indicator of problem-solving performance. The findings of this study enhance our understanding of physics problem-solving processes and highlight opportunities for improving instruction and feedback for physics problem solving by considering the sequential structure of students’ physics problem-solving approaches.

Asian(American) physics students lack ample representation in physics identity studies and in the broader science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) sociological literature. This may be due to their perceived overrepresentation, the “model minority” myth, or their treatment as monolithic. These misconceptions obscure the diversity among Asian(American) students. How do these students understand and form their physics identity? Through in-person interviews, we have gathered data on the experiences of self-identifying Asian or Asian American undergraduate physics majors. For our analysis, we draw from previous physics identity research and use the critical physics identity framework developed in recent studies on Black physicists’ identities. We present results from the ideational resource code and emergent codes generated from the data, such as Transnational Context and Asianization. Our findings suggest that some participants found other personal and social identities beyond their race or ethnicity to be salient to their physics identity and experience. Our results also indicate that the perceptions of Asian(Americans) as overrepresented in STEM may also serve to hide the less privileged identities that some of the participants hold and thereby the challenges that come with those less visible identities.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) experienced a resurgence in popularity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this work, we studied participants in an astrobiology MOOC offered on Coursera since April 2019. Using a modified version of the Science Motivation Questionnaire II, we examined the primary motivational factors of the participants, how those factors related to demographics and course performance, and how participants in our MOOC compared to those in a general astronomy MOOC as well as traditional undergraduate students. Participants in the astrobiology MOOC were more highly motivated when compared to the general astronomy MOOC across all five motivational factors we surveyed: intrinsic, career, grade, self-determination, and self-efficacy. Compared to the undergraduate population, astrobiology MOOC participants reported higher motivations in all the factors except for career and grade. We found that demographics had some impact on these results, with older participants reporting lower career and grade motivations and female participants having generally higher motivations compared to males. Despite this, male participants and those older than 40 were more likely to complete the course. As the astrobiology MOOC was initially offered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we also looked at the impact the pandemic had on these results. The demographics of participants changed significantly, with the percentage of participants under the age of 30 and the percentage of those identifying as full-time students doubling compared to prepandemic. The motivations of participants also changed, with participants showing more career and grade motivation since the pandemic. Interestingly, the increase in younger and more full-time student participants has continued even with the return of in-person learning. This suggests that the pandemic introduced MOOCs to a new population of learners who have continued to utilize them in the years since.

In this study, we explore the use of analogies with classical physics in introductory quantum physics (QP) teaching. This work is part of a larger project in which a learning sequence covering three introductory QP topics was designed, tested, and evaluated in collaboration with high school teachers and physics education researchers. Based on the theoretical foundations of guided inquiry-based learning and collaborative learning, three lessons covering the topics of photoelectric effect, wave-particle duality, and tunneling were developed. For each lesson, a digital inquiry learning space (ILS) was created which implemented a digital laboratory for performing experiments with specific interactive assignments and multimedia material. For this study, each ILS was adapted into two distinct versions, to be applied with students in two experimental conditions: one in which analogies with classical physics were present in the lessons, and one in which such analogies were avoided. Six classes of Dutch upper-secondary students ($n=89$) were assigned to one of the conditions and followed the respective version of the learning sequence during a period of approximately 6 weeks. Students’ answers to ILS activities were logged and used for a qualitative analysis. Once the learning sequence was finished, students took a post-test covering all three QP topics and scores were compared between the analogy and no analogy conditions. After correcting for students’ overall performance in physics, we found that students in the no analogy condition scored significantly higher on the post-test than the analogy condition for two out of the three QP topics (wave-particle duality and tunneling). An accompanying qualitative analysis suggests that the use of analogies with classical physics might hinder QP learning, as some students manifested difficulties in grasping the limitations of the classical analogies that were used in the materials.

We have previously described the reformed introductory physics course, collaborative learning through active sense-making in physics (CLASP), for bioscience students at a large public research one university (Original University) and presented evidence that the course was more successful and more equitable than the course it replaced by several measures. Now we compare the original success of CLASP with an implementation at a second institution. We find that the original results hold at another institution despite some changes to the original curriculum and a somewhat different student population. We find that students who take CLASP are (1) less likely to drop, (2) less likely to fail, and (3) do as well in later coursework when compared to students who took the courses that CLASP replaced, even if that coursework is not similarly reformed. We find the above items to be independently true for historically marginalized students and remarkably, also find that (4) marginalized students who take CLASP are more likely to graduate from a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics field. We use a course deficit model perspective to examine these results and discuss some of the factors that may have contributed to this success. We argue that higher education has the tools needed to significantly increase equity and improve student success and retention.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] The ability to relate physical concepts and phenomena to multiple mathematical representations—and to move fluidly between these representations—is a critical outcome expected of physics instruction. In upper-division quantum mechanics, students must work with multiple symbolic notations, including some that they have not previously encountered. Thus, developing the ability to generate and translate expressions in these notations is of great importance, and the extent to which students can relate these expressions to physical quantities and phenomena is crucial to understand. To investigate student understanding of the expressions used in these notations and the ways they relate, clinical think-aloud interviews were conducted with students enrolled in an upper-division quantum mechanics course. Analysis of these interviews used the symbolic forms framework to determine the ways that participants interpret and reason about these expressions. Multiple symbolic forms—internalized connections between symbolic templates and their conceptual interpretations—were identified in both Dirac and wave function notations, suggesting that students develop an understanding of expressions for probability both in terms of their constituent pieces and as larger composite expressions.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Research-based multiple-choice questions implemented in class with peer instruction have been shown to be an effective tool for improving students’ engagement and learning outcomes. Moreover, multiple-choice questions that are carefully sequenced to build on each other can be particularly helpful for students to develop a systematic understanding of concepts pertaining to a theme. Here, we discuss the development, validation, and implementation of a multiple-choice question sequence (MQS) on the topic of quantum measurement in the context of wave functions in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. This MQS was developed using students’ common difficulties with quantum measurements as a guide and was implemented in a junior-/senior-level quantum mechanics course at a large research university in the U.S. We compare student performance on assessment tasks focusing on quantum measurement before and after the implementation of the MQS and discuss how different difficulties were reduced and how to further improve students’ conceptual understanding of quantum measurement in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.

In physics education research, instructors and researchers often use research-based assessments (RBAs) to assess students’ skills and knowledge. In this paper, we support the development of a mechanics cognitive diagnostic to test and implement effective and equitable pedagogies for physics instruction. Adaptive assessments using cognitive diagnostic models provide significant advantages over fixed-length RBAs commonly used in physics education research. As part of a broader project to develop a cognitive diagnostic assessment for introductory mechanics within an evidence-centered design framework, we identified and tested the student models of four skills that cross content areas in introductory physics: apply vectors, conceptual relationships, algebra, and visualizations. We developed the student models in three steps. First, we based the model on learning objectives from instructors. Second, we coded the items on RBAs using the student models. Finally, we then tested and refined this coding using a common cognitive diagnostic model, the deterministic inputs, noisy “and” gate model. The data included 19 889 students who completed either the Force Concept Inventory, Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation, or Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey on the LASSO platform. The results indicated a good to adequate fit for the student models with high accuracies for classifying students with many of the skills. The items from these three RBAs do not cover all of the skills in enough detail, however, they will form a useful initial item bank for the development of the mechanics cognitive diagnostic.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Quantum mechanics is an integral course for physics students. An understanding of quantum concepts is imperative for enrollment in physics graduate programs, participating in research within physics fields, and employment with companies developing quantum technologies. This study analyzes 188 U.S. research-intensive institutions’ course catalogs to determine the role and extent of quantum mechanics in their undergraduate physics programs. All of the institutions required one course on quantum concepts, 92% required two courses, and half required three. Among institutions with complete class data ($n=56$), the quantum curriculum was analyzed using course syllabi. The mean number of classroom hours spent on quantum concepts was 63.5 h with a standard deviation of 28.1 h. The most commonly taught themes in the quantum curriculum were the equation and three-dimensional quantum mechanics. However, the Stern-Gerlach experiment was only included in 28% of the course outlines. Despite current efforts to promote a spin-first approach, this study found the traditional position-first approaches were still more common as they were used by 73.7% of instructors.

Response to the continuing call to integrate scientific inquiry activities into high school education has taken different forms varying in student ownership, physical setting, time span, and mentoring resources. Important issues are how students perceive central dimensions of their experience, and the extent to which the inquiry framework design serves to promote a sense of growth in the participants. The current research followed a group of 34 high school physics students who participated in the out-of-school Research Physics program over a 3-year period (2016–2019), gradually progressing from inquiry-oriented lab activities to an extended inquiry project under the guidance of teacher-mentors, within an instructional design of cognitive apprenticeship. The research focused on a set of 15 inquiry components, some directly related to experimental practices such as formulating inquiry questions, preparing and performing experiments, data processing using technological tools, others related to the scientific culture of presenting oral and written inquiry reports, and finally abilities of teamwork and self-regulation. Data regarding students’ perceptions of three aspects—Experience, Difficulty, and Development with respect to the inquiry components, were collected at the end of each year, using self-report questionnaires. The analysis of longitudinal trends revealed several inquiry components for which significant changes occurred in the perceptions of the three aspects, which can be mainly related to the program design. The research hypothesis regarding the relationship between the three aspects was that the perceived Development would match the levels of the perceived Experience and Difficulty for all 15 inquiry components. The quantitative analysis revealed four groups of inquiry components, only two of which aligned with the hypothesis. The quantitative findings are explained based on program design and qualitative data about student effort and ways of coping and teacher-mentor scaffolding methods.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] There is a growing need in the United States for a workforce trained in quantum information science and technology (QIST), a disciplinary topic that is rarely addressed in precollege science, mathematics, and computer science curricula. University quantum physics and physics education researchers designed and initiated a 4-week, 12-h QIST professional development workshop for $N=51$ preservice and in-service secondary school science, mathematics, and computer science educators. A STEM integration framework guided the workshop structure, which incorporated a situated cognition model for learning quantum concepts and computing, identifying recent advances in quantum technologies, planning curricula, and differentiating among QIST subfields including quantum communication, quantum computation, quantum simulation, and quantum metrology and sensing. The pre-/post-research design employed a newly developed teacher attitude survey, Teacher Self-Efficacy in Quantum Information Science and Technology Scale (TSE-QIST). Exploratory factor analysis identified three latent constructs in teachers’ self-efficacy, including (i) knowledge about QIST academic pathways and careers; (ii) QIST pedagogical fluency and STEM integration; and (iii) facilitating QIST learning. Parametric comparisons of means indicated that teacher participants showed significant gains overall and in all latent constructs with medium to large effect sizes ($p<0.001$). This professional learning model shows promise in strengthening teachers’ self-confidence in pedagogical content knowledge of quantum ideas so they may facilitate student engagement in quantum information science, a field that involves conceptual change and is often considered abstract, counterintuitive, inaccessible, and suitable only for the academically elite. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] As one of the successful theories in physics, quantum physics, constructed out of physical ideas and expressed mathematically, provides the required information for the development of technology by describing atomic or quantum systems. For several reasons related to the characteristics of quantum physics knowledge, students struggle with understanding the concepts forcing them to change their classical thinking. However, previous research showed that discussing quantum physics phenomena with peers helped students in problem solving, improving understanding, and constructing quantum physics knowledge. In this study, we focused on students’ knowledge construction in several different quantum physics topics with peer discussions depending on the kind of quantum physics problems and group structure. Examination of students’ tests with 45 quantum physics problems and reflection reports for four sessions during the semester indicated that the occurrence of knowledge construction is associated with group size and gender composition but not with the kind of problems. The knowledge construction condition is also related to group size, and satisfaction with knowledge and disagreements in group discussions are important for the construction of quantum physics knowledge.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] One hallmark of expertise in physics is the ability to translate between different representations of knowledge and use the representations that make the problem-solving process easier. In quantum mechanics, students learn about several ways to represent quantum states, e.g., as state vectors in Dirac notation and as wave functions in position and momentum representation. Many advanced students in upper-level undergraduate and graduate quantum mechanics courses have difficulty translating state vectors in Dirac notation to wave functions in the position or momentum representation and vice versa. They also struggle when translating the wave function between the position and momentum representations. The research presented here describes the difficulties that students have with these concepts and how the research was used as a guide in the development, validation, and evaluation of a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) to help students develop a functional understanding of these concepts. The QuILT strives to help students with different representations of quantum states as state vectors in Dirac notation and as wave functions in position and momentum representation and with translating between these representations. We discuss the effectiveness of the QuILT from in-class implementation and evaluation.

We propose a technique for performing deductive qualitative data analysis at scale on text-based data. Using a natural language processing technique known as text embeddings, we create vector-based representations of texts in a high-dimensional meaning space within which it is possible to quantify differences in meaning as vector distances. To apply the technique, we build off prior work that used topic modeling via latent Dirichlet allocation to thematically analyze 18 years of the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings literature. We first extend this analysis through 2023. Next, we create embeddings of all texts and, using representative articles from the 10 topics found by the LDA analysis, define centroids in the meaning space. We calculate the distances between every article and centroid and use the inverted, scaled distances between these centroids and articles to create an alternate topic model. We benchmark this model against the LDA model results and show that this embeddings model recovers most of the trends from that analysis. Finally, to illustrate the versatility of the method, we define eight new topic centroids derived from a review of the physics education research literature by Docktor and Mestre and reanalyze the literature using these researcher-defined topics. Based on these analyses, we critically discuss the features, uses, and limitations of this method and argue that it holds promise for flexible deductive qualitative analysis of a wide variety of text-based data that avoids many of the drawbacks inherent to prior NLP methods.

Undergraduate students on track for medical school are often required to take general physics lab courses. Many of these students carry an attitude of obligation into these courses which can make it challenging for instructors to engage students in course material. We address the question: How does engaging with medically based models in introductory physics labs affect pre-med undergraduate perceptions of the modeling process and their perceptions of science? We redesigned an electricity and magnetism lab in an introductory physics lab course, where approximately 70% of the undergraduates reported plans to attend medical school. We situated the lab in the mechanics of MRI magnetic resonance and collected data on the participants’ experiences through surveys and lab submissions. As a part of the analysis, we modified a rubric to evaluate engagement in modeling and applied grounded coding theory to the survey responses to develop themes of the participants’ understanding of scientific modeling. The participants’ understanding and engagement in scientific modeling increased during the newly developed lab and remained high for subsequent labs. We recommend that instructors of undergraduate nonmajor labs consider the demographic of their student population and design lab experiences situated within their interests and focus on central science practices like modeling.

We examine students’ challenges in determining the number of distinct many-particle stationary states for a system of noninteracting identical particles, focusing on how these insights guided the design, validation, and evaluation of a quantum interactive learning tutorial (QuILT) to aid students’ understanding. Specifically, we focus on systems with a fixed number of available single-particle states and particles, where the total energy is not fixed. The QuILT is designed to provide scaffolding support to help students learn these complex concepts more effectively. This study was conducted in advanced quantum mechanics courses, where written questions were administered to students in class following traditional instruction on the relevant concepts. Additionally, individual interviews were conducted with students to gain deeper insights. Our findings reveal that both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students face similar challenges in understanding these concepts. Additionally, difficulty with basic concepts in combinatorics that are necessary to answer the questions correctly was also found. The QuILT offers scaffolding support to help undergraduate and graduate students systematically reason through these concepts.