Self-explanation, a learning strategy where students explain to themselves the steps taken in a worked example, is an effective learning strategy in early cognitive skill acquisition. However, many physics students produce self-explanations of low quality. There is also a lack of guidelines for what students should seek to explain when studying worked examples. Therefore, the overarching purpose of this article is to investigate how we can improve students’ self-explanations of worked examples. We pursue the following two general research questions: (1) What knowledge representations should students seek while self-explaining worked examples to maximize their learning? (2) Can retrieval practice of physics principles and their conditions of application potentiate students’ learning from self-explaining worked examples? In two studies ($n=18$ and $N=54$), we qualitatively categorized and quantified the students’ written self-explanations. Our results indicate that to produce useful knowledge, self-explanations of the physics model in worked examples should explain what principle is used, how the principle is set up, and how the conditions of application are met for the principle, while explanations of the mathematical procedures should contain action descriptions, goals, and conditions ($r=0.30$–0.50). Through a quasiexperimental ($N=57$) and an experimental ($N=54$) test, we found evidence that retrieval practice of physics principles and their conditions of application before self-explanation can have a medium-sized effect on post-test problem-solving scores and that it can increase the quality of students’ self-explanations. Using retrieval practice to potentiate learning from more complex learning strategies is a novel and promising approach to improve physics students’ learning.

There is a large variety of goals instructors have for laboratory courses, with different courses focusing on different subsets of goals. An often implicit, but crucial, goal is to develop students’ attitudes, views, and expectations about experimental physics to align with practicing experimental physicists. The assessment of laboratory courses upon this one dimension of learning has been intensively studied in U.S. institutions using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). However, there is no such an instrument available to use in Germany, and the influence of laboratory courses on students views about the nature of experimental physics is still unexplored at German-speaking institutions. Motivated by the lack of an assessment tool to investigate this goal in laboratory courses at German-speaking institutions, we present a translated version of the E-CLASS adapted to the context at German-speaking institutions. We call the German version of the E-CLASS, the GE-CLASS. We describe the translation process and the creation of an automated web-based system for instructors to assess their laboratory courses. We also present first results using GE-CLASS obtained at the University of Potsdam. A first comparison between E-CLASS and GE-CLASS results shows clear differences between University of Potsdam and U.S. students’ views and beliefs about experimental physics.

In science education, it is vital for teachers to consider students’ academic and emotional needs. Teachers’ prediction of students’ learning states has been commonly regarded as an indicator to measure that competence to understand students. This study aimed to explore the outcome and the process of prediction to reflect teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. The study was to detect the differences in preservice teachers’ eye movement behaviors with eye-tracking technology between the prediction group and nonprediction group. The prediction group predicted the option students will most likely choose for a given question, while the nonprediction group solved the problems on their own. The result showed that preservice teachers in the prediction group were more considerate of students’ ideas and review the information among different areas of interest when they were required to detect the problem from the perspective of students. In the prediction group, preservice teachers with positive prediction focused more on the correct option repeatedly, while those with negative prediction tended to inspect carefully within each incorrect option. In addition, successful and unsuccessful problem solvers in the nonprediction group responded to problems in a different manner, in which successful problem solvers paid more attention to inspecting information from options, including both correct option and incorrect options.

Several recent studies have employed item response theory (IRT) to rank incorrect responses to commonly used research-based multiple-choice assessments. These studies use Bock’s nominal response model (NRM) for applying IRT to categorical (nondichotomous) data, but the response rankings only utilize half of the parameters estimated by the model. We present a mathematical argument for why this practice of using half of the NRM parameters when ranking responses is appropriate based on the primary question of multiple-choice tests: How can we use students’ responses to test items to estimate their overall knowledge levels? We provide additional motivation for this practice by recognizing the similarities between Bock’s NRM and the probability function of the canonical ensemble with degenerate energy states. As physicists often do, we exploit these mathematical similarities to gain new insights into the meaning of the IRT parameters and a richer understanding of the relationship between these parameters and student knowledge.

This study describes a psychometric evaluation of high school student responses to the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), and the subsequent development of a more parsimonious attitudes and beliefs survey structure for potential use with K-12 students in physics courses aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. Pre- and postsurvey response data were obtained from high school students in the 2017–2018 and 2018–2019 school years, whose instructors were partnered with the Physics through Evidence: Empowerment through Reasoning project. Exploratory factor analysis methods were used to propose a physics attitudes and beliefs survey with a more parsimonious factor structure, and confirmatory factor analysis methods provide support for the survey’s structural stability. These preliminary results suggest that the CLASS is fertile ground for the development of shorter attitudes and beliefs surveys that may be more easily implemented and interpreted by instructors in K-12 contexts. Replication analyses and potential uses of the more parsimonious survey structure are also discussed.

A central goal of introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) is to prepare students to use physics to model and analyze biological situations, a skill of increasing importance for their future studies and careers. Here we report our findings on life science students’ ability to carry out a sophisticated biological modeling task at the end of first-semester introductory physics. Some students were enrolled in a standard course ($N=34$), and some in an IPLS course ($N=61$); both courses were taught with active learning, used calculus, and included the same core physics concepts. Compared to those who took the standard course, we found that the IPLS students were significantly more successful at building a model that combined ideas in a manner they had not previously seen, and at making complex decisions about how to apply an equation to a particular physical situation, although both groups displayed similar success at solving simpler problems. Both groups identified and applied simple models that they had previously used in very similar contexts, and executed straightforward calculations, at statistically indistinguishable rates. We report both our findings and the rationale behind the development of the task, in the hopes that others may find this task either a valuable tool or a starting point to develop other such tasks. Further study is needed to determine the basis for the IPLS students’ stronger performance—namely, what aspects of the IPLS course support these students to be better prepared to do such modeling—as well as whether biological settings are important for IPLS students to succeed in flexible model building, and whether the ability to employ models flexibly persists over time.

We investigated to what extent secondary school students have insight in the apparent motion of the Sun and stars (AMoSS). We used the AMoSS test instrument, which focuses on distinctions between different aspects of the apparent motion of the Sun and stars. It consists of 12 multiple-choice questions accompanied by explanations. We administered the test to students of the fifth year (16–17 years old) of six Belgian secondary schools ($N=410$) during a science lesson in school and asked them to explain their choices. We found that, despite instruction, most students only demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of the apparent motion of the Sun and stars for different times during the day, different times during the year, and different locations of the observer. Moreover, we see a clear distinction between the responses to the questions about the Sun and stars. Thanks to the classification system that we developed to categorize the written explanations and a latent class analysis, we are able to identify different mental models that students use to answer questions about the apparent motion of the Sun and stars.

Over the last decade, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been recognized as a way to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education by engaging students in authentic discovery. CUREs have been shown to have positive benefits similar to traditional undergraduate research experiences; however, they can reach a larger number of students and are open to all students who enroll in the course. Motivated by the need to redesign the large introductory physics lab at The University of Colorado–Boulder to be fully remote in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we designed and implemented the first remote, large-enrollment, physics CURE. Here, we detail the motivations and the challenges when designing the course, and provide detailed descriptions of the course components. Throughout the course, we collected course artifacts and administered surveys to the students. Based on these data sources, we find that this course helped students gain research skills and coding confidence, engage in productive and enjoyable teamwork experiences, and feel motivated and interested in experimental physics research.

Instructional labs are fundamental to an undergraduate physics curriculum, but their possible learning goals are vast with limited evidence to support any particular goal. In this study, we evaluate the efficacy of labs with different goals and structures on students’ critical thinking skills and views about experimentation, using an extensive database of survey responses from over 20 000 students at over 100 institutions. Here, we show that labs focused on developing experimentation skills improve students’ critical thinking skills and experimentation views compared to labs focused on reinforcing lecture concepts. We further demonstrate the positive impacts of skills-based labs over concepts-based labs on these outcomes across students’ gender and race or ethnicity. Our analysis also shows that activities to support students’ decision making and communication explain over one-half and one-third of the effect of skills-based labs on students’ critical thinking skills and experimentation views, respectively, while modeling activities have only a small effect on performance.

Coordination class theory has proven to be a useful theoretical framework for describing processes of conceptual change in certain physical and mathematical concepts. Its development throughout different studies has allowed us to understand numerous mechanisms of conceptual learning by individual subjects. There have been attempts to implement this theory to collective-learning environments. Although there are valuable contributions in this sense, there are still details at the fine-grain level to be unveiled in relation to how conceptual change proceeds within small groups. For this purpose, the development of a coordination class is analyzed in the case of an interview with two students addressing a problem-solving task about entropy, focusing on the role that interactions between participants play in the evolution of the entropy concept. A microcomplementary analysis is proposed by bringing in elements from a sociocultural approach of learning. Thus, we were able to identify different forms of codevelopment of a coordination class. Students exhibiting central as well as peripheral participation benefit from each other during the conceptual learning process of the small group, constituting a “virtuous” interaction for learning.

This paper examines the prevalence of rapid answer copying among university students completing online homework for an introductory level calculus-based physics course taught remotely during the COVID pandemic. We first compared the attempt duration distribution of 26 problems, between 42 students who self-reported as having completed the homework by themselves against the rest of the class. Significant differences were detected for 3 out of 26 problems. We then identified abnormally short problem attempts indicative of potential rapid answer copying, by fitting the attempt duration distribution of each problem with finite-mixture models, using mixtures of either normal or skewed distributions. We detected a significantly smaller fraction of short attempts from self-reporting students on only 3 out of 26 problems and found no statistically significant difference in percentage correct of short attempts between the populations. In conclusion, our analysis did not find evidence indicating widespread rapid answer copying among students. We also explored differences in learning behavior between the two populations by applying process mining to the event logs of one of the homework learning modules, which reveals that some students may have copied answers after spending a longer time or using multiple attempts on a given problem. However, this form of answer copying is also unlikely to be prevalent since the percentage correct on normal attempts is also similar between the two populations on most problems.

Back-of-the-envelope (BOTE) calculations require the use of estimations and approximations. They are used by expert physicists to simplify complex problems to obtain quick and approximate solutions. Though BOTE calculations are routine for experts in physics, they are not well defined in academic literature. In this study we interviewed 9 physicists working in academia and industry and characterized experts’ responses in terms of the decisions made during different stages of the solution process. These findings characterize the individual skills that students need to develop in order to solve BOTE problems. We find that BOTE calculations involve most of the same decisions as bigger research problems. Thus, BOTE problems represent authentic, real-world physics problems that present challenges undergraduate students are often not prepared to solve. This provides an interesting foundation for future work characterizing other factors that influence both students’ and experts’ decisions to perform BOTE calculations.

Diversity and inclusion in the field of physics has been an important area of research in the last two decades. However, such work has scarcely looked at the concerns and barriers faced by $\mathrm{LGBT}+$ physicists, despite numerous indications they face discrimination in wider society. This article presents the first study looking at the climate experiences and persistence of LGBT physicists through an online survey ($N=324$) focused on intragroup differences within the $\mathrm{LGBT}+$ community. The results indicated that 36% of all respondents reported considering leaving their institution or workplace with 22% reporting that they experienced exclusionary behavior in the last year (i.e., being shunned, ignored, or harassed). However, this number varied by gender with transgender participants (49%) experiencing the most exclusionary behavior. Overall, respondents who could be out about being $\mathrm{LGBT}+$ were more comfortable at their institutions and workplaces. The results point to the increasing challenges of $\mathrm{LGBT}+$ physicists who are also transgender or persons of color, indicating the need for further research on this topic.

Sound is one of the most commonly used physical phenomena that most of us use without considering its nature. Moreover, students often face difficulties in understanding acoustic phenomena, the most frequent one of which is the substance-based view of sound instead of a process of pressure and density differences. The current study introduces sound to the physics class through a combination of history of science (HOS) and dialogic teaching, which, although research in science education shows that they both may benefit students for a variety of reasons, are frequently absent from traditional science classrooms. We present four HOS-based whole class dialogic discussions (WCDD): the first and second are about the nature of sound; the third is about sound amplification in a stethoscope; and the fourth is about sound propagation in a tight string of a “lovers’ telephone.” The WCDD were held with a group of 27 university students. We further examine students’ concepts regarding acoustical phenomena as expressed in these WCDD, show how insights and perspectives learned from HOS could be used to structure WCDD in order to guide students’ thinking, and analyze the conceptual flow patterns of the discussions. Finally, we discuss the possible contribution of HOS to dialogic teaching and the parallelism of historical and students’ misconceptions today that often appears.

The article sets out to contribute to the educational challenge launched by the second quantum revolution. An approach to quantum computing has been outlined for secondary school students. The approach is shaped as a set of four principles that have been pointed out to design instructional materials to enhance the educational and cultural potential of quantum computing, beyond the technical aspects. In the paper, following a presentation of the design principles, we focus on an activity on quantum teleportation protocol. The activity is described in detail to show how the principles have been concretely implemented. A pilot study with a small sample of secondary school students has been carried out to evaluate the potential of the approach. The results, although preliminary, show that the approach appears to be promising in creating an inclusive and productive learning environment, in which students feel encouraged to search for personal ways to combine different levels of discourse (narrative, logical, mathematical, technical-experimental) and generate meaningful descriptions of the phenomenon.

As physics laboratory courses (labs) transition from traditional, model-verifying activities to discovery-based investigations, it becomes crucial to understand the role of the instructor in the implementation of various lab types. Prior work has started to address this need by examining either coarse-grained frequencies or fine-grained content of instructor interactions in labs. However, neither of these methods offer both a detailed and time-efficient procedure for measuring such interactions, which is required for comparisons across multiple sessions of several types of labs. Here we describe and present the results of a new approach to quantifying student-instructor interactions in labs by analyzing video recordings and drawing on techniques of social network analysis. Across five sections of three lab course offerings, we find that there is a higher total level of interaction between students and instructors in reformed discovery-based labs than in traditional labs. We find no clear pattern in the durations of student-initiated and instructor-initiated interactions across various instructors and lab types. The results suggest that the amount of interaction between instructors and students during lab is more a product of the instructional design than an individual instructor’s implementation of that design. This work is a preliminary step toward understanding the extent to which student-instructor interactions support the improved outcomes observed in discovery-based labs compared with traditional labs.

A goal of introductory physics for life sciences (IPLS) curricula is to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and medical settings. To assess whether this goal is being met, we conducted a longitudinal study of the impact of IPLS on student work in later biology and chemistry courses. We report here on one part of that study, a comparison of written responses by students with different physics backgrounds on a diffusion task administered in a senior biology capstone course. We observed differences in student reasoning that were found to be associated with prior or concurrent enrollment in IPLS. In particular, we found that IPLS students were more likely than non-IPLS students to reason quantitatively and mechanistically about diffusive phenomena, and to successfully coordinate between multiple representations of diffusive processes, even up to two years after taking the IPLS course. Finally, we describe methodological challenges encountered in both this task and other tasks used in our longitudinal study.

Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures. In this paper, we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction. We name mechanisms that facilitate the reproduction of whiteness in this local context, including a particular representation of energy, physics values, whiteboards, gendered social norms, and the structure of schooling. In naming whiteness and offering a set of analytic markers, our aim is to provide instructors and researchers with a tool for identifying whiteness in their own contexts. Alongside our discussion, which imagines new possibilities for physics teaching and learning, we hope our work contributes to Critical Whiteness Studies’ goal of dismantling whiteness.

Eye tracking is becoming increasingly popular in physics education research (PER). As technology has advanced considerably in recent years and has become more user friendly, it is anticipated that eye tracking will play an increasingly significant role in assessing student learning at the process level in future studies. The main objective of this systematic review is to summarize the current status quo regarding eye tracking in PER and reviewing (a) the dissemination, (b) the methodological implementation, and (c) the insights provided by eye tracking in PER. We identified 33 journal articles, published between March 2005 and April 2021, that used eye tracking for original empirical research in the area of physics education. The results reveal that although eye tracking has been used in many different areas of physics, a clear focus on mechanics is evident, particularly for measuring visual attention in assessment scenarios like problem solving. While a high methodological rigor in the selection and analysis of the visual stimuli was apparent, only a few studies have provided a complete documentation of the technological implementation (e.g., movement restrictions, accuracy, and calibration information) and a theoretical embedding for interpreting eye-tracking data. To synthesize the results of the different studies, we created an inductive category system in accordance with the considered independent variables of the studies. Accordingly, visual attention was most frequently compared between levels of performance (correct vs incorrect or high vs low achievers), thereby leading to performance-discriminating factors of eye movement across studies. Furthermore, learners’ eye movements were compared across different stimuli, different time points, or between student groups to inform multimedia design and shed light on students’ learning progression. In summary, eye tracking is particularly useful for studying processes in different domains that are relevant to PER. Specific gaps in the literature, methodological limitations, and implications of existing findings were also identified to recommend future research and practices.