While commercially available mixed-reality (MR) head-mounted devices are also increasingly used in education the impact of MR learning environments is mostly being evaluated with respect to learning outcomes and learning gains alongside a number of affective variables. Here we aim at a deeper understanding of the influence of MR on experimental problem-solving processes by means of eye-tracking analyses as an addition to self-reported and questionnaire-based test instruments. On the basis of a didactically and empirically sound designed MR learning environment for experimental problem solving with an electrical circuit we investigate how novices and experts differ in their success in problem solving and their visual attention for both a MR learning environment and a non-MR condition. Our results indicate that MR not only has a positive effect for both groups on success in problem solving, but that it is also accompanied by significant shifts of visual attention on the different parts of the experiment.

The 2020–2021 academic year was a unique time for many instructors who had to adapt their courses to be conducted remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was especially challenging for physics lab courses, which usually emphasize hands-on experiments. Although many courses have now returned to in-person teaching, the possibility remains of future disasters necessitating similar remote courses. It is important to understand how undergraduate students experienced remote physics lab courses during the pandemic, including what aspects of the courses contributed to positive student outcomes. To investigate this, we surveyed over 5000 students from 24 different institutions, asking how the students engaged with their physics lab courses during the 2020–2021 academic year. Here, we describe the frequency with which the students performed various class activities, aspects of the course environment, challenges the students faced, aspects of the courses the students found enjoyable, and some student outcomes. We further study the impact of the course activities and course environment on four of the outcomes (self-reported learning of lab skills, self-reported learning of concepts, course enjoyment, and development of a sense of community). We find that students who were provided clear expectations, had enough time for their coursework, frequently worked in groups, and frequently had access to guidance from their instructors were more likely to report positive outcomes. This work demonstrates the importance of certain aspects of lab courses for several desirable outcomes in remote lab courses during a pandemic, with findings that may transfer to in-person or remote lab courses in the future.

This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different institutions over a year and a half using three semistructured interviews each. The data enabled the identification of relevant context elements; the impact of these elements on physics faculty was explored by adapting a framework that examines instructors’ professional development. The analysis shows that both case study subjects used their physics expertise and growing understanding of their context to develop their physics teaching. However, this growth was enacted differently given the nature of their context, highlighting instructors’ strengths in navigating their local context to improve their physics teaching. The results show the subtleties of how context has a salient, complex, and evolving role in moderating faculty’s professional development. By taking a faculty-centric approach, this paper broadens the community’s awareness of the ways physics instructors develop their physics teaching. This work contributes to a relatively new lens by which the physics community views, discusses, and supports the professional development of physics faculty.

In previous work we analyzed databases for 95 classes to show that the percent grade scale was correlated with a much higher student fail rate than the 4.0 grade scale. This paper builds on this work and investigates equity gaps occurring under both scales. By employing a “course deficit model” we attribute the responsibility for closing the gaps to those who are responsible for the policies that guide the course. When comparing course grades in classes graded using the percent scale with those in courses graded using the 4.0 scale, we find that students identifying as belonging to racial or ethnic minorities underrepresented in physics suffer a grade penalty under both grade scales but suffer an extra penalty under percent scale graded courses. We then use the fraction of A grades each student earns on individual exam items as a proxy for the instructor’s perception of each student’s understanding of the course material to control for student understanding and find that the extra grade penalty students from groups underrepresented in physics students suffer under percent scale grading is independent of the student’s understanding of physics. When we control for more student level variables to determine the source of the grade scale dependent penalty, we find that it is primarily the low F grades (partial credit scores) on exam problems that are the source of these inequities. We present an argument that switching from percent scale grading to a 4.0 grade scale (or similar grades scale) could reduce equity gaps by 20%–25% without making any other course changes or controlling for any incoming differences between students.

Student learning in simple electric circuits has been extensively studied, which has revealed a large number of persistent misunderstandings. This study applies the conceptual framework model to investigate student difficulties in the knowledge integration perspective. The results are used to guide the design of a concept test that targets the different stages of knowledge integration in student learning of electric circuits. Specifically, two areas of research have been conducted. First, based on content analysis by experts and a review of the literature on students’ conceptual understandings, a conceptual framework for electric circuits is developed. The conceptual framework model is then applied to guide the development of a multiple-choice concept test for assessment of knowledge integration in learning electric circuits. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from high school students who had completed the learning of electric circuits. The results confirmed that the conceptual framework model can effectively represent the knowledge structures of students at different levels of knowledge integration. In addition, the assessment outcomes also reveal that the concept test is effective in identifying unique features of knowledge integration, including context dependence and fragmentation of knowledge components, memorization-based problem solving, difficulty in transfer to novel contexts, and lack of meaningful connections between microscopic and macroscopic models of electric current. The assessment outcomes can also provide practical information for instruction to promote knowledge integration in learning electric circuits.

Studying students’ problem-solving abilities in physics education research has consistently shown that novices focus on a problem’s surface features rather than its physical principles. Previous research has observed that some electricity and magnetism students confuse electricity and magnetism concepts, often presented in parallel problems (or problems with similar surface features). This confusion has been referred to as interference. It is essential to compare students’ performance in these problems to evaluate their understanding of these topics. The present work focuses on the students’ understanding of interactions between charged particles (i.e., electric force) and electric currents (i.e., magnetic force). We present and compare the findings on students’ conceptions when analyzing electric and magnetic interactions for different systems of field sources. We conducted this study with engineering students finishing a calculus-based course on electricity and magnetism. We administered a written, open-ended questionnaire with two sets of three items: one version contained only electricity problems, and the other contained only magnetism problems. Each item in the electricity version of the test had a parallel counterpart in the magnetism version. We used a phenomenographic approach to analyze our data to identify categories that emerged from students’ answers. We identified four main ideas in the results: (a) the rule of signs (ROS), which does not evidence a complete conceptual understanding of electric interactions; (b) the force-field confusion due to the similarity of electricity and magnetism contexts; (c) the importance of semiotic representation when answering an electricity and magnetism problem, where the student’s choice of representation indicates their understanding, and (d) the interference phenomenon, in which we find evidence of other factors besides those produced by the timing of instruction and administration of the tests. At the end of this work, we provide recommendations for instruction.

Interdisciplinary introduction to quantum information science (QIS) courses are proliferating at universities across the US, but the experiences of instructors in these courses have remained largely unexplored in the discipline-based education research (DBER) communities. Here, we address this gap by reporting on the findings of a survey of instructors teaching introduction to QIS courses at institutions across the U.S., primarily at the undergraduate or hybrid undergraduate and graduate level, as well as follow-up focus interviews with six individual instructors. Key themes from this analysis include challenges and opportunities associated with the diversity of instructor and student backgrounds, student difficulties with the mathematical formalism (especially though not exclusively with linear algebra), and the need for better textbooks and curricular materials. We also find that while course topics are ostensibly similar, each course is crafted by its instructor to tell a different story about QIS and to uniquely balance goals such as accessibility and academic rigor, such that no canonical introduction to QIS course emerges from our dataset. We discuss the implications of this finding with regard to the benefits and risks associated with standardization of curricula as QIS coursework matures.

This study investigated factors influencing Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) pretest and post-test scores for a sample ($N=1116$ students) collected in the introductory calculus-based mechanics class at a large eastern land-grant university. Several academic and noncognitive factors were examined using correlation analysis and linear regression analysis to understand their relation to students’ physics conceptual understanding. High school physics preparation was the most important factor in predicting FMCE pretest score. The kind of high school physics class (normal or Advanced Placement) and the student’s academic performance in that class also greatly affected pretest scores. The optimal linear regression model explained 28% of the variance of pretest scores. Controlling for pretest score, ACT or SAT verbal and mathematics scores, students’ grade expectation, and self-efficacy significantly predicted post-test score. The optimal linear regression model explained 54% of the variance of post-test scores. Pretest scores completely captured the effect of high school preparation on post-test scores; if pretest scores were included in a model predicting post-test scores, then high school physics preparation variables were not significant. Gender differences were observed on both the pretest and the post-test. These differences were not substantially mediated by either academic or noncognitive factors.

The prevalence of online instruction highlights the importance of videos in education. Pedagogies that include elements that actively engage students are accepted as an improvement over more passive modes of instruction. How can we transfer the advantages of active engagement to instruction via video? Previous research on instructional videos has shown that there are a number of principles, the adherence to which benefit student learning by maximizing productive cognitive processing. To understand the impact of combining such principles we designed and produced four different versions of the same physics demonstration video, varying levels of “visual enhancement” designed around these principles and the amount of active engagement across the different versions. Using pre-post video testing, we compared how much viewers learned across the four different versions. We found that actively engaging students by embedding questions throughout the video increases student learning. We also found that physics videos are most effective when they include enhanced visuals and embedded questions. Notably, it is the combination that matters most; the learning effect from embedding questions is increased when the video also includes enhanced visuals. This study represents an important step towards understanding how instructors can design and refine their videos to maximize student learning.

$\mathrm{LGBT}+$ persons in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics have a small growing body of literature addressing their experiences and workplace concerns. This study offers workplace climate analysis of 324 survey respondents in the field of physics. The findings indicate that when building a climate model to predict for consideration to leave and outness, a positive workplace climate was a stronger predictor than a negative workplace climate or experiences of exclusionary behavior. This points to the importance of moving beyond workplace climates that are simply neutral, but to ones that are inclusive and welcoming for $\mathrm{LGBT}+$ physicists. This is the final paper in a series of three.

Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions take place under conditions that favor commitment, trust, and decision making among those who interact. The worldwide pandemic due to COVID-19 and the transition to emergency remote teaching have added new challenges for collaboration, mainly because now students’ interactions are wholly mediated by information and communication technologies. This study first explores the effectiveness of different collaborative relationships over performance in physics from a sample of secondary students from two schools located in rural and urban areas in southern Chile (exploratory study). We used social network analysis to map academic hierarchies as in the nominations for proficient peers in physics (i.e., physics prestige), collaboration, and friendship ties. We define a strong association if two students who collaborate shared a friendship tie. Using ordinary least squares multiple linear regression models on physics grades, we found positive effects of collaboration over grades, particularly among students working with friends (strong ties). To test whether the effects of collaboration found in the first study were stable throughout two semesters, the following year we designed a quasiexperiment in four classes from the same urban school in the exploratory study. Here, students attended hybrid school sessions where research participants were either in the classroom or participated remotely. The teacher collected the same social networks described in the first study at the end of semester 1, and two times during semester 2. In addition, we followed the same procedures to identify strong and weak collaboration from the network data on each wave of data collection. After fitting ordinary least squares multiple linear regression models, we found that collaborative variables negatively associated with grades on activity 1 (semester 1), yet at the end of the year (activity 3 in semester 2) having strong working ties became positively associated with physics grades. Interestingly, the relationship of academic hierarchies measured in physics prestige with grades transitions from positive on semester 1 to null by the end of the year. These results contribute to the literature of collaboration in physics education and its effectiveness, by taking into account social relationships and the needed time for developing beneficial collective processes among students in the classroom. We discuss these results and their implications for instructional design and guidelines for constructive group-level processes.

We conducted a multiyear project across three institutions to develop an instructional tutorial that supports student understanding of change of basis in quantum mechanics. Building from our previous work, we identified learning goals to guide activity development. The tutorial makes an analogy between spin-$1/2$ states and a Cartesian coordinate system. This paper details the iterative development process including reports of observations from classroom implementations and the resulting modifications to the activity. Further, we report preliminary findings on the success of the activity in improving students’ ability to correctly change basis and their articulation that change of basis is a choice of representation, not a change to the physical system.

A common task when problem solving in quantum mechanics, including in a spins-first curriculum, involves changing the basis of a given state. Our research in undergraduate quantum mechanics courses at three institutions explores student thinking about basis, basis expansion coefficients, and change of basis in the context of spin-$½$ systems. Our investigation is based on conceptual and computational written questions as well as student reasoning interviews. We identify student ideas about whether and how changing basis affects the state, examine how students perceive notation as indicative of choice of basis, explore students’ interpretations of the structure and meaning of a basis expansion, and identify the range of methods students employ when changing basis. For instance, we find a recurring idea that changing basis alters the physical system, and observe that some students chose to relabel the ket representing a quantum state vector after changing basis. Together, these results paint a broad, qualitative picture of a variety of ways that students grapple with basis and change of basis, with potential implications for instruction.

Self-efficacy has emerged as one of the most important noncognitive variables explaining academic behavior. It has been shown to influence students’ academic and career decisions as well as their academic performance. Multiple studies have reported differences in self-efficacy between men and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classes. A student’s personality, characterized by the five-factor model, is also related to academic performance; some personality facets are substantially different for men and women. This work examines the relations among the five-factor model of personality (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness), self-efficacy toward physics and mathematics, and course outcomes in university physics and mathematics classes. Women reported significantly higher neuroticism in all classes, a medium to large effect size, and significantly higher conscientiousness in Calculus 1 and Physics 1, small effects. Men reported higher self-efficacy in two-semester Calculus 1, one-semester Calculus 1, Physics 1, and Physics 2, small effects. Conscientiousness and neuroticism had competing mediational effects on the relation of gender to self-efficacy. The path through neuroticism accounted for 25%–47% of the total effect of gender on self-efficacy (increasing self-efficacy for men) and the path through conscientiousness accounted for 12%–23% of the total effect (increasing self-efficacy for women). Self-efficacy mediated the relation of conscientiousness to course grade in all classes, accounting for 30%–45% of the total effect.

We investigated students’ physics motivational beliefs including their physics self-efficacy, interest, perceived recognition, and identity in a traditionally taught two-semester college calculus-based introductory physics sequence (referred to as physics 1 and physics 2). We studied whether and how these motivational beliefs evolve in this course sequence in terms of the average scores and the predictive relationships among them. The results show that both female and male students’ physics self-efficacy and interest decreased from physics 1 to physics 2, while there was no statistically significant change in students’ perceived recognition and identity. We found signatures of an inequitable and noninclusive learning environment in that not only was there a gender difference in students’ motivational beliefs disadvantaging women, but the gender difference in perceived recognition increased from physics 1 to physics 2. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate the predictive relationships among students’ motivational beliefs in physics 1 and physics 2. Analysis revealed that perceived recognition from others, e.g., instructors and teaching assistants, was the largest predictor of physics identity in both courses, and the role played by perceived recognition was even more important in physics 2 for predicting identity and mediating the gender difference in self-efficacy. Our findings suggest that perceived recognition is very important for the development of students’ physics identity in both physics 1 and 2. However, female students feel less recognized in the current learning environment and this gender difference grows from physics 1 to physics 2. Instructors should be trained to create an equitable and inclusive learning environment, in which all students feel recognized and supported appropriately and develop a stronger physics self-efficacy, interest, and identity.

Surveys have long been used in physics education research to understand student reasoning and inform course improvements. However, to make analysis of large sets of responses practical, most surveys use a closed-response format with a small set of potential responses. Open-ended formats, such as written free response, can provide deeper insights into student thinking, but take much longer to analyze, especially with a large number of responses. Here, we explore natural language processing as a computational solution to this problem. We create a machine learning model that can take student responses from the Physics Measurement Questionnaire as input, and output a categorization of student reasoning based on different reasoning paradigms. Our model yields classifications with the same level of agreement as that between two humans categorizing the data, but can be done by a computer, and thus can be scaled for large datasets. In this work, we describe the algorithms and methodologies used to create, train, and test our natural language processing system. We also present the results of the analysis and discuss the utility of these approaches for analyzing open-response data in education research.

This study aimed at analyzing the impact of problem-based learning (PBL) in improving physics students’ conceptual understanding of mechanical waves. This study used a quasiexperimental, pretest–post-test control group design with PBL instruction as a teaching intervention. The participants of this study were 239 physics students from 19 secondary schools in Western Uganda. We analyzed data with SPSS v.23.0 using repeated two-way analysis of variance tests. We found that unlike the superposition of mechanical waves concepts, PBL effectively improves students’ understanding of propagation, reflection, and standing waves more than the usual or traditional teaching method. Teachers were recommended to teach with PBL to assess students’ difficulties to remedy them and uplift their understanding.

Student sense of belonging in physics classes may not only play a key role in shaping course outcomes but also influence student persistence and future career aspirations. Prior research has shown that women have a lower sense of belonging than men in calculus-based introductory physics courses. However, prior research has generally not investigated students’ sense of belonging in introductory physics courses in which women are not underrepresented. We administered a validated survey to investigate the sense of belonging of 814 students and how it predicts student grades in a mandatory introductory physics course primarily for bioscience majors. In particular, we investigated how students’ sense of belonging predicts female and male students’ grade at the end of the mandatory physics course for bioscience majors using structural equation modeling. We found that women had a lower sense of belonging and grade than men in this course and that the students’ sense of belonging played a major role in predicting students’ grade in the course. In addition, while men’s sense of belonging significantly increased from the beginning to the end of the physics course, women’s sense of belonging did not significantly change by the end of the course.

Student motivational beliefs in introductory physics courses can influence their course outcomes as well as their retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines and future career aspirations. Prior research has shown that students’ perceived recognition by others as a physics person is important in predicting their physics identity and career choices. This study used validated survey data from 827 students in the first of two college algebra-based introductory physics courses primarily taken by bioscience majors, in which women make up approximately 67% of the class. We investigated how the students’ perceived recognition by instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) as a physics person predicts their grade at the end of a mandatory physics course for bioscience majors in which women are not outnumbered by men. We found that overall women had lower perceived recognition than men as a physics person and their perceived recognition played an important role in predicting course grades controlling for high school GPA and math SAT scores. Since physics as a discipline presents a barrier to women due to deep-rooted societal stereotypes and biases about who can excel in it, the numerical representation of women alone in these courses does not imply that they will feel recognized by their instructors and TAs as a physics person without an intentional effort to make the learning environment equitable and inclusive. These findings suggest that physics instructors and TAs should focus on changing the culture in their physics classes and create an equitable and inclusive learning environment in which students from traditionally marginalized demographic groups, e.g., women, feel recognized, and can excel.

Inquiry practices can be integrated into various settings that differ in terms of their constraints and hence in the scope and depth of the practices that students experience. Key policy papers suggest implementing a gradual learning sequence for inquiry practices so that students’ learning experiences in more constrained settings can serve them later in extended research projects. What type of learning progression in inquiry is valued by students? To answer this question, students’ views were examined while progressing from inquiry-oriented instructional labs to an extended research project. This was done in the context of the Research Physics program, a three-year program consisting of an introductory stage followed by a long-term ($\sim 18$ months) research project. The group administered interactive questionnaire methodology was used to collect student reflections at the interface between the two stages of the program, both individually and in groups. Students were asked to identify inquiry practices they had encountered during the introductory stage and to evaluate their contribution to their projects. Findings showed that while students perceived the development of measurement, analysis, and self-monitoring skills as useful in preparing them for future research projects, this was not the case for the practices of teamwork and communication of knowledge. We explain these findings, using the boundary crossing theoretical lens, by looking at the different meanings these two practices take on when imported from the physicist’s lab to the educational lab and suggest that this impedes the cultural boundary crossing between these two settings.