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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) described in Ladson-Billings’ framework has three conceptions: conceptions of self and others, conceptions of knowledge, and conceptions of social relations. Instructors can support students with positive learning experiences when they are cognizant of all three conceptions. In 13 interviews of physics instructors about CRP, we found many instructors shared only two productive conceptions: conceptions of self and others and conceptions of social relations. However, we found two instructors who effectively described all three conceptions. Their conceptions of knowledge focused on physics knowledge as constructed, reconstructed, and in some aspects containing subjectivity. They both articulated a critical approach to examining the historical and contextual factors that influence physics learning today. Our findings indicate that instructors’ beliefs about the nature of science can be entangled with their own enactment of CRP and we show how a sophisticated epistemology can be one route to more culturally relevant instruction.

We developed the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL) to assess students’ quantitative reasoning in introductory physics contexts. The PIQL includes several “multiple-choice-multiple-response” (MCMR) items (i.e., multiple-choice questions for which more than one response may be selected) as well as traditional single-response multiple-choice items. In this paper, we discuss differences in performance on MCMR items that seems to result from differences in administration method (paper versus online). In particular, we find a tendency for “clickiness” in online administration: students choose more responses to MCMR items when taking the electronic version of the assessment. Student performance on single-response multiple-choice items was not affected by administration method. These results suggest that MCMR items may provide a unique opportunity to probe differences in online and on-paper administration of low-stakes assessments.

In the context of quantum mechanics, students are often asked to use delta functions to solve problems. Here, we investigate three typical problem-solving processes using delta functions: a delta function potential well problem, a position space delta function problem, and a momentum space delta function problem. We studied students’ solutions in written exams and conducted think-aloud interviews. We use the activation, construction, execution, and reflection framework for our analysis. We find that students encountered various difficulties in solving quantum mechanics problems using delta functions. Common challenges included difficulty with establishing expressions of delta functions for position eigenstates, difficulty with expressing the orthonormality of eigenfunctions with continuous spectra using delta functions, difficulty with boundary conditions for delta function potentials, and difficulty with calculating integrals involved delta functions. In particular, students rarely used effective reflective methods to gain confidence in their solutions. We commonly observed this challenge for students in all questions we investigated. In addition, we compare the similarities and differences in the use of delta functions in electrostatics and in quantum mechanics, and discuss possible explanations for the reasoning mechanisms that cause these difficulties. Finally, we discuss the potential pedagogical implications of our findings.

Identifying students’ difficulties in understanding Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws is important for developing educational strategies that promote an expertlike understanding of the field concept and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetic phenomena. This study aims to analyze and compare students’ understanding of symmetry when applying Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws to calculate the electric or magnetic field. We conducted a study to analyze how students reason regarding the symmetry conditions necessary to apply Gauss’s or Ampere’s laws to calculate the electric or magnetic field in three inverse problems. We applied two open-ended questionnaires with parallel surface features, one for Gauss’s law and the other for Ampere’s law, to 322 engineering students. The three inverse problems present different scenarios with the common characteristic that there is no sufficient symmetry to solve the electric or magnetic field from its corresponding equation. We analyzed students’ answers with a phenomenographic approach, focusing on students’ answers to a yes or no question and their reasoning. The main findings of the study are the descriptive categories of understanding and the comparison of the categories between contexts (outcome space). The correct reasoning is identifying the necessary symmetry to apply Gauss’s or Ampere’s law. The other categories refer to the surface features of each scenario to explain students’ answers, applying Gauss’s or Ampere’s law in an oversimplified way and thinking that it would be possible but more complicated in these scenarios. The descriptive categories are related to some of the difficulties previously reported in the literature with standard problems involving Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws. However, inverse problems elicited variations in the types of reasoning related to the surface features of the scenarios and their parallel representations. The comparative analysis between the electricity and magnetism contexts allowed for identifying that analyzing currents can be more challenging for students than analyzing point charges. This study’s findings can guide introductory and intermediate electricity and magnetism instructors to redirect their approach to Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws by introducing the analysis of inverse problems.

In 2017 the University of Utah experienced a tragedy which catalyzed already active changes in the department. In the aftermath, admissions to the graduate program was paused while new policies were developed and implemented. This article outlines this change process through the perspectives and accounts of those involved. Through in-depth interviews with students, staff, faculty, and administrators the process of change was found to be a complex path that involved robust practices of gathering input. This input was considered by a centralized group (the executive committee) advising the department chair and administrators. Findings indicated that the collective desire to reopen the program inspired most faculty to work together to find solutions, while some stakeholders did not fully buy in to large-scale programmatic changes. Further, interviews revealed the persistence of deep cultural challenges after the development and implementation of new policies. A new metaphor for this change is suggested to be a bonfire, as a tragedy sparked the fire of change structures which had already been built, and continual fuel is needed to sustain these changes. Moving forward the department is extending their graduate reform into undergraduate initiatives and normalizing evidence-based teaching practices. Content warning: This paper discusses the death by suicide of a graduate student.

We present a study on the development of Finnish first-year physics majors’ attitudes towards physics, as measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey, before, during, and after the period of mandatory remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic. We find that in the years before the pandemic, these attitudes did not change, but the period of extended remote learning due to the pandemic had a negative effect on the students’ expertlike views. Similarly, the students who experienced the remote learning period in high school displayed a lower level of expertlike thinking as they entered university. As contact teaching resumed, moderate positive gains were seen, bridging some but not all of the gap in student attitudes left by the pandemic.

Students’ social belonging in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses has repeatedly been shown to be an important influence on students’ outcomes in these courses. Previous studies have further identified students’ sense of belonging and belonging uncertainty as related but unique components of their broader social belonging that can independently affect outcomes. High belonging uncertainty (doubts about the quality of one’s social connections or academic ability in a course) may particularly disadvantage historically marginalized groups in physics, such as women or students of color who face negative stereotypes based on their identity. Additionally, high-stakes exams, such as traditional final exams in introductory physics classes, can disproportionately disadvantage historically marginalized groups. In this study, we investigated the effect of social belonging on students’ performance across two Introductory Physics 1 sections with two variations of final assessment: one section that took a traditional final exam and one section that completed a nontraditional final course project. Both assessment types were high stakes and constituted a similar, substantial proportion of students’ final course grade. We found that both students’ sense of belonging and belonging uncertainty impacted their final assessment score, regardless if they took the traditional final exam or completed the nontraditional final project. The findings of this study illustrate how students’ social belonging can impact performance even on nontraditional assessments if such assessment is of similar high stakes to a traditional exam.

To investigate how physics students perceived the sudden shift to online learning at the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, 18 semistructured interviews were conducted with university students in Austria, Croatia, and Germany. Based on the interviews, a questionnaire was developed and data from $N=578$ physics students from five universities in Germany, Austria, and Croatia were gathered. In this paper, we report how students perceived synchronous and asynchronous physics lessons, how their perception correlates with their self-organization skills, which activities and teaching methods were perceived as helpful, and what are the implications for future physics courses. The most common advantages of synchronous course elements reported by students were the possibility to immediately ask questions, the feeling of community and interaction with other students, and the defined daily structure, whereas the most common advantages of asynchronous course elements reported were flexible time management and the possibility to watch videos at their own pace. The data indicate a correlation between preference for synchronous courses and their general self-organization, so instructors should be aware of this connection when planning future courses. Face-to-face lectures at university were perceived as the most helpful course element, followed by the recorded lectures from the instructor and the group work on the assignments, projects, and problems with other students. Furthermore, our results suggest that most students would in the future like to preserve the upload of learning materials and recorded video of the lectures in addition to classroom lectures. Overall, the results of this study suggest that both synchronous and asynchronous course elements should be combined in future online and in-person physics courses.

Researchers have pinpointed recognition from others as one of the most important dimensions of students’ science and engineering identity. Studies, however, have found gender biases in students’ recognition of their peers, with inconsistent patterns across introductory science and engineering courses. Toward finding the source of this variation, we examine whether a gender bias exists in students’ nominations of strong peers across three different remote, introductory physics courses with varying student populations (varying demographics, majors, and course levels). We also uniquely evaluate possible racial or ethnic biases and probe the relationship between instructional context (whether lecture or laboratory) and recognition. Some of our results replicate previous findings (such as the association of course grade and small class section enrollment with nominations), while others offer contradictions. Comparing across our three courses and the prior work, results suggest that course level (whether first-year students or beyond-first-year students) might be more associated with a gender bias in peer recognition than other variables. Surprisingly, we also find instances of racial or ethnic biases in favor of students from backgrounds historically underrepresented in science. Finally, we find that the nomination patterns differ when students nominate individuals strong in the lecture material versus the laboratory material. This work serves as an important step in determining which courses and contexts exhibit biases in peer recognition, as well as how students’ perceptions of one another form in remote teaching environments.

We discuss an investigation of students’ motivational beliefs and performance on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) in a calculus-based introductory physics course at a large public university in the U.S. We investigated how students’ perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment (including perceived recognition, perceived effectiveness of peer interaction, and sense of belonging) predicts students’ FCI scores and physics motivational beliefs (including self-efficacy, interest, and overall physics identity) at the end of the course after controlling for students’ high school performance and their FCI scores and motivational beliefs at the beginning of the course. We find signatures of noninclusive learning environment in that female students’ mean scores in physics motivational beliefs and perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment were lower than male students’, and the gender gap in students’ self-efficacy increased from the beginning to the end of the course. Using structural equation modeling, we find that the gender differences in students’ motivational beliefs and FCI scores were mediated by the different components of students’ perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment. In particular, students’ perceived recognition, e.g., by instructors, was an important predictor of their overall physics identity, and their sense of belonging predicted their self-efficacy and FCI scores. Our findings can be valuable for contemplating guidelines for creating an inclusive learning environment in which all students can excel.

Students sometimes learn about a model of the “scientific method” that is linear and clear cut. While this approach may have pedagogical advantages, it does not reflect how science is often done in practice. The Experimental Modeling Framework (EMF) describes the complex and iterative process of experimentation in the domain of physics, including comparing predictions with experimental data and enacting revisions to models and apparatus. We conducted interviews with 10 undergraduate students who had just completed an advanced physics lab course in order to investigate their views about the EMF as a depiction of the process experimental physics. We report the results of a thematic analysis that investigates students’ views about the EMF and explores the extent to which students identified iteration as an important aspect of experimental physics. Generally, the students in this study found the EMF to be reflective of the process of experimental physics. They identified several distinct differences between the EMF and a traditional depiction of a linear scientific method (SM), including the lack of iteration in the SM, as well as the importance of asking questions and reporting results, which is absent from the EMF. Additionally, student discussions of the fundamentally iterative nature of science were most likely to occur during direct comparisons of the EMF and SM. We discuss implications of this study for both research and instruction. We suggest that, in a lab course where iteration is a goal, explicit in-class discussions and comparisons of models of the process of experimentation could be beneficial for students’ epistemological development.

Informal physics programs bring physicists together with youth and adults from local communities to engage with physics content outside of classroom settings. These public engagement or “physics outreach” programs are a significant endeavor of the physics community; however, we lack a systemic documentation of these efforts, which makes it difficult to situate physics education research on individual informal physics programs into a broader narrative. Additionally, informal physics programs have many formats and vary in terms of their audience, content, activities, and resources. It is important to understand these aspects of programs if we want them to be more equitable and inclusive. This work shows our early steps of a large project aiming to map the landscape of informal physics programs in the United States. Drawing from organizational theory, and using data collected from a national sample of programs, we have created and validated a survey for lead facilitators to capture the who, what, where, when, and why for their informal programs. After validation, we completed targeted data collection within one state as a test case for broader implementation. Our analysis of the sample ($n=18$ programs at 6 institutions) shows that there are many different factors other than common presentation-style labels that are relevant, such as geographic reach, audience demographics, funding, and involvement of physics students. One notable finding is that university physics students play a big role in the operation of these programs, making them rich environments for the attention of physics education researchers and administrators at academic institutions.