Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are key partners in the education of undergraduates. Given the potentially large impact GTAs can have on undergraduate student learning, it is important to provide them with appropriate preparation for teaching. But GTAs are students themselves, and not all of them desire to pursue an academic career. Fully integrating GTA preparation into the professional development of graduate students lowers the barrier to engagement so that all graduate students may benefit from the opportunity to explore teaching and its applications to many potential career paths. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a GTA preparation course for first-year Ph.D. students at the Georgia Tech School of Physics. Through a yearly cycle of implementation and revision, guided by the 3P framework we developed (pedagogy, physics, professional development), the course has evolved into a robust and comprehensive professional development program that is well received by physics graduate students.

This paper is a follow-up to a previous study, in which students (predominately life science majors) were found to self-express achievement goals with regard to a prelab problem-solving exercise in an algebra-based introductory physics course. In this paper, the same sampled population was also asked in the same feedback survey to discuss what portion or portions of the course were relevant to their respective choices of major; in responding, students expressed another aspect of mindset, namely, perceived relevance of the course to their majors. We primarily investigate the difference between 50 students who perceived no relevance of introductory physics to their major and 168 students who perceived some form of relevance. The primary finding was that students who perceive relevance will experience more expertlike shifts than students who do not. In particular, the attitudinal survey’s item clusters that pertain to personal interest and real-world connections appear to show the strongest effect. Further examination showed that biology majors and health science majors (two distinctive subpopulations of life science majors) show similar pre-post trends for relevance vs irrelevance perceptions, whereas students with a performance achievement goal appeared to bifurcate between a novicelike shift for perceived irrelevance and no attitudinal shift from pre to post for perceived relevance.

This article reports the development of a two-tier simple electric circuits test (2T-SEC Test). Simple electric circuits are introduced to students early in their school years and are an important part of the physics curriculum all the way to the university level. However, many students do not develop an adequate conceptual understanding of simple electric circuits and especially of electrical voltage. For this reason, six physics education research groups from Germany and Austria started a large study to evaluate and improve middle-school students’ conceptual understanding of simple electric circuits. As a first step, we developed the test instrument presented in this article. First, nine semistructured interviews were conducted with middle-school students in Austria. The interviews were transcribed, analyzed and (common) student difficulties with simple electric circuits were identified. Second, based on the results from the interviews and previous research on this topic, an instrument consisting of 25 two-tier multiple-choice items was developed and administered to $N=1568$ middle-school students in Austria and Germany. Third, the data were evaluated using Rasch analysis. The item reliability of the test was 0.99, while the person reliability of paired scoring was 0.62 and the reliability of separate scoring was 0.75. The average difficulties of the main concepts regarding simple electric circuits (open and closed circuits, electric current, resistance, series and parallel circuits, and electrical voltage) were calculated and compared. The analysis suggests that the concept of voltage is most difficult for students while distinguishing between open and closed circuits is the easiest.

We analyzed student engagement in physics during a summer course for incoming first-year students, part of a cohort-based learning community designed for students from underrepresented groups in the School of Engineering of a predominantly white institution. The data—video of an episode within the course and interviews of the 11 students one year later about their experiences in the program and the course—support two findings: (i) The students cared for each other, in a social sense, and felt cared for by the instructor, and (ii) the students framed the course as focused on their own reasoning. We argue that the former supported the latter, and we offer this as a conjecture for further study: Social caring can support productive epistemological framing. If this is correct, it would suggest the benefits of aligning what takes place within courses with the socially supportive dynamics of extracurricular cohort-based learning communities.

A deep understanding of mechanical waves is crucial for students to succeed in studying many advanced physics topics. Studies in existing literature have revealed that students often have widespread difficulties and misconceptions on wave propagation. This research develops and applies a conceptual framework model to examine students’ understanding of mechanical wave propagation from the knowledge integration perspective. Based on the existing literature and interview results, the conceptual framework model of wave propagation was developed and used to guide the development of a multiple-choice test that targets the assessment of knowledge integration in students’ understanding of wave propagation. The assessment was given to first-year college students enrolled in a calculus-based introductory physics course at a medium-ranking Chinese university. The results suggested that after traditional instruction the majority of the students only achieved intermediate level knowledge integration with fragmented knowledge structures and lacked a deep conceptual understanding of wave propagation. The conceptual framework and assessment outcomes were then used to inform the development of new instruction, which made explicit emphasis on teaching the central idea of the conceptual framework and making connections to the central idea within students’ knowledge structures. The effectiveness of the instruction was evaluated with the same pool of college students separated into an experimental group and a control group. Pre-post testing results suggested that the new instruction significantly improved students’ performance on questions that require an integrated knowledge structure, indicating advancement in knowledge integration and deep understanding.

Values affirmation exercises have been implemented in many contexts to combat stereotype threat in students from marginalized populations; the exercises are intended to fortify students by prompting them to self-affirm their values in short writing activities. Within the physics education research community, the style of intervention was underlined by a positive result from the University of Colorado Boulder; researchers were able to use the intervention to minimize the achievement gap between men and women in an introductory physics course. These results inspired a replication experiment in two physics courses at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and this article provides some history and context of these interventions, describes our specific implementation, and reveals that we were unable to reproduce the positive results despite thorough attention to the details of the replication. Our findings suggest that the values affirmation exercises are not understood at a level where they should be considered a positive intervention to help marginalized populations.

In this study, we evaluate the validity of question 29 (Q.29) in the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), which requires an understanding of atmospheric pressure. At least in some Japanese physics classes, the rate of the correct answer to Q.29 is reduced between the pretest and post-test. To examine this deterioration of a student’s response, we analyzed 429 explanations written by 358 respondents about the force described in the question. Many learners, who were not aware of atmospheric force, chose the correct answer. On the other hand, many of the wrong respondents had learned about air pressure but did not understand it. As a result, postinstruction learners tended to have a worse rate of correct response. This made Q.29 less sensitive to a Japanese student’s ability. This characteristic feature of Q.29 is visually confirmed by a modified item response curve, which represents correlation between the response to one item and the total score of the other items.

Student learning in upper-division thermal physics has not been studied to the same extent as in other courses like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. Studies addressing reasoning and learning at the graduate level are even more limited. In this study, we conducted think-aloud interviews with eight graduate students involving questions centered around a set of entropy related conceptual tasks, two of which are similar to tasks presented to undergraduates in other studies. We discuss patterns in student reasoning on each question then discuss themes that appeared across questions. We identify conceptual resources that students frequently used to reason about the interview tasks and compare them to prior work. We observed graduate students commonly thinking about entropy in relationship to a number of states, even in situations where such a connection was not directly relevant. Graduate students also frequently made direct associations between entropy and temperature, despite there being no general, explicit relationship between the two quantities. On the whole, graduate students demonstrated adaptability and metacognitive awareness in their approach to reasoning about entropy.

Sound educational policy recommendations require valid estimates of causal effects, but observational studies in physics education research sometimes have loosely specified causal hypotheses. The connections between the observational data and the explicit or implicit causal conclusions are sometimes misstated. The link between the causal conclusions reached and the policy recommendations made is also sometimes loose. Causal graphs are used to illustrate these issues in several papers from Physical Review Physics Education Research. For example, the core causal conclusion of one paper rests entirely on the choice of a causal direction although an unstated plausible alternative gives an exactly equal fit to the data.

Science knowledge is reflected in mental models that students tend to form when dealing with science phenomena. One way to identify students’ mental models about scientific concepts is the use of diagnostic tests (inventories). Even though several statistical approaches and tools intended for the analysis of such inventories’ results exist in the literature, there are certain inventories for which analysis might require the development of more convenient tools. Thus, there seems to be no simple way to handle the results of inventories whose items include different numbers of statements, the number of statements relating to the same mental model within an item is not fixed, and neutral distractors are possible. This exploratory study aims at meeting this challenge and suggests a relatively simple statistic $F_{2m}$ for estimating the mental model state of a subject or a group of subjects in the case of two mental models under consideration, providing a preliminary estimation of $F_{2m}$ consistency using the results of the sound concept inventory instrument.

There are studies of students’ understanding of the concept of the electric field, the magnetic field, and the use of the superposition principle that have contributed to the creation of both educational strategies and assessment tools. However, the difficulties of these two concepts have not been compared comprehensively. Therefore, this study aims to compare students’ conceptual understanding of electric and magnetic fields in questions regarding the field created by one source and the field produced by a system of two sources. We focus our study on students’ explanations about the magnitude and direction of the field and their application of the superposition principle in both contexts (electric and magnetic). We conducted this study with 322 engineering students in a Mexican university. We designed two versions of an open-ended questionnaire, one with the context of electricity and the other with magnetism. We created the questions using the parallelism between electricity and magnetism and used schematic representations with similar surface features to represent this parallelism. Analyzing the data through a phenomenographic approach, the students’ drawings and explanations gave insight into their understanding of the concept of field and the superposition principle application in the context of electricity and magnetism. We found that students have similar categories of understanding the concept of the electric and the magnetic field. In both contexts, there is an evident relationship between applying the principle of superposition and understanding the concept of field. We found that there is a greater tendency that a student correctly applies the superposition principle if that student has a robust representation of the field. We found evidence that students consistently merge two different representations (vector plots and field lines) in electricity and magnetism. We named this category of representation “hybrid vectors and field lines.” We also found that some students who draw hybrid representations of the field can still apply the superposition principle correctly. However, some conceptual understanding difficulties are dependent on the context: the known difficulty of confusion between forces and fields is more attached to the electricity context. The confusion between electricity and magnetism concepts is more relevant in the magnetism context. As in other literature, we found more evidence that the correct answer in multiple-choice questions may lead students who have mild difficulties (such as memorization and creating a hybrid representation) to choose a correct answer. We recommend that teachers and researchers of electricity and magnetism acknowledge the relationship between the conceptual understanding of the field and applying the superposition principle. We suggest that instructors be attentive to how they approach using representations of electric and magnetic fields.

Newton’s third law is one of the most important concepts learned early in introductory mechanics courses; however, ample studies have documented a wide range of students’ misconceptions and fragmented understandings of this concept that are difficult to change through traditional instruction. This research develops a conceptual framework model to investigate students’ understanding of Newton’s third law through the knowledge integration perspective. The conceptual framework is established with a central idea emphasizing forces as quantitative measures of physical interactions instead of using the common action-reaction language. Guided by the conceptual framework, assessment and interview results reveal that students’ concepts of Newton’s third law are fragmented without deep understanding. Specifically, three main issues within students’ understanding have been identified: (i) students have a disconnect between time order of events and causal reasoning, (ii) students rely on a memorized equal-and-opposite rule to identify interaction forces, and (iii) students directly link action-reaction language to the belief in a causal relation between the interaction forces. The framework is then applied to develop a new instruction intervention that explicitly targets the central idea of Newton’s third law. Results from pre- and post-testing show that the intervention is effective in helping students develop more integrated understandings of Newton’s third law. Overall, this study shows the potential benefits of applying the conceptual framework method to model student knowledge structures and guide assessment and instruction for promoting knowledge integration and deep learning.

An analysis of 1955 physics graduate students from 19 Ph.D. programs shows that undergraduate grade point average predicts graduate grades and Ph.D. completion more effectively than GRE scores. Students’ undergraduate GPA (UGPA) and GRE Physics (GRE-P) scores are small but statistically significant predictors of graduate course grades, while GRE quantitative and GRE verbal scores are not. We also find that males and females score equally well in their graduate coursework despite a statistically significant 18 percentile point gap in median GRE-P scores between genders. A counterfactual mediation analysis demonstrates that among admission metrics tested only UGPA is a significant predictor of overall Ph.D. completion, and that UGPA predicts Ph.D. completion indirectly through graduate grades. Thus UGPA measures traits linked to graduate course grades, which in turn predict graduate completion. Although GRE-P scores are not significantly associated with Ph.D. completion, our results suggest that any predictive effect they may have is also linked indirectly through graduate GPA. Overall our results indicate that among commonly used quantitative admissions metrics, UGPA offers the most insight into two important measures of graduate school success, while posing fewer concerns for equitable admissions practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting in-person research a health risk for interviewers and participants. Near the start of the pandemic, many universities pivoted to emergency remote teaching where courses were delivered remotely in observance of safety guidelines. The safety guidelines also necessitated that research be done remotely. We designed a remote interview protocol for a computational physics based qualitative interview. Using Zoom’s features, we created an interview that allowed participants many modes of interacting with the interviewer and the interview task materials. We present the interview methods and evaluate the utility of remote interviews. We then generalize the experiences from designing and conducting remote interviews for contexts outside of computational physics and describe how task design choices were influenced by technology. We find that conducting interactive remote interviews can be an effective method for physics education researchers even outside of the pandemic.

This work describes the implementation of a hierarchical team model, the Integrated Peer Leadership Program (IPLP), in a calculus-based college introductory physics classroom. Using this model, in which students in the course engage with their peers throughout the semester, we observe a significant increase in the students’ likelihood of successfully completing the course. The model also reduces the gap between underrepresented minority (URM) and non-URM students. Learning gains using the IPLP format are improved as compared to previous data for traditional classes. The model transforms a traditional lecture style class into a student-centered class without additional time requirement or cost to the instructor or institution, and we anticipate that it will be portable to other large section introductory college science courses.

Concept inventories are commonly used tools in physics education research (PER) for evaluating teaching methods. Student responses to concept inventories have been studied using classical test theoretical methods such as factor analysis and network methods such as module analysis. The results of these studies have been used to evaluate the instruments and to find aggregate patterns that may be used to infer how students’ think about the concepts on the inventory. In this work, we apply modified model analysis using partial correlations, a network based method using partial correlations, to evaluate the Quantum Mechanics Concept Assessment (QMCA). The QMCA is designed to measure student understanding of upper-division quantum mechanics in both the spatial wave function and the spins contexts. This represents the first time a network-based analysis has been applied to an upper-division concept inventory. The modules we found are related to the structure of the instrument. There were two broad classes of modules: those that connected responses (either both correct or both incorrect) to isomorphic pairs questions written to probe the same concept in the spatial wave function and the spin contexts. The second class of modules were explain pairs, where the first question asked about a concept and the second question asked students to explain their choice, again either both correct or both incorrect. This structure resembles the structure of the Force Concept Inventory where there are a common correct and a common incorrect pair for many concepts, compared to the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation, which has larger and more varied communities reflecting a smaller number of topics.

With the adoption of instructional laboratories that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students’ activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular, understanding when students do not engage productively with unexpected data may provide insights into how to better support students in more open-ended labs. We examine video and audio data from groups within a lab session where students were expected to find data inconsistent with the predictions of two models. In prior work, we examined the actions of the four groups that productively grapple with this designed problem. Here, we analyze the engagement of the three groups that do not. We conducted three phases of analysis: (1) documenting large scale behaviors and time spent in on-topic discussion, (2) analyzing interactions with the teaching assistant, and (3) identifying students’ framing—their expectations for what is taking place—when they were discussing their data. Our phase 1 and 2 analyses show only minor differences between the groups that engaged with the problem and those that did not. Our phase 3 analysis demonstrated that the groups that did not engage with the problem framed the lab activity as about confirming a known result or as a series of hoops to jump through to fulfill assignment requirements. Implications for instruction include supporting teaching assistants to attend to students’ framing and agency within laboratory classrooms.

The rapid transition to remote teaching in the spring of 2020 posed particular challenges for laboratory courses, which often involve students working hands-on with equipment in collaborative environments. Replicating in-person experiments was especially challenging for advanced lab courses that utilize specialized apparatus, which could not be accessed by students at home. However, physics lab instructors employed a variety of creative strategies to overcome these barriers and provide students access to lab-like learning in a remote setting. We report on one advanced lab course that used the transition to remote teaching to completely redefine the course goals and transition from traditional prescriptive labs to more open-ended projects. We conduct a case study analysis, triangulating among several data sources—survey responses and interviews from both instructor and students—to construct an in-depth understanding of the remote course and how students experienced it. Although we cannot necessarily generalize the results of this analysis to the entire student experience in the course due to the student response rate, the feedback that the course did receive from both students and the instructor was overwhelmingly positive, and the instructors are planning to retain the open-ended projects when the course returns to an in-person format. We find that the new open-ended projects afforded students opportunities to make decisions and think deeply about their experiments, which students report as contributing to their enjoyment and satisfaction with the course. Students had mixed group work experiences, with some describing positive and meaningful interactions and others describing group work as a source of frustration and stress. Additionally, some students missed being able to work hands-on with equipment, and some reported a high workload that made the course stressful. We discuss these student experiences and provide implications for both in-person and remote lab courses.

Physics outreach programs provide a critical context for informal experiences that promote the transition from new student to contributing physicist. Prior studies have suggested a positive link between participation in informal physics outreach programs and the development of a student’s physics identity. In this study, we adopt a student-focused investigation to explore the effects of informal programs on dimensions of physics identity, sense of community, 21st century skill development, and motivation. We employed a mixed methods study combining a survey instrument (117 responses) and interviews (35) with current and former undergraduate and graduate students who participated in five programs through a physics and astronomy department at a large land-grant university. To examine interviews, we employed a framework based on situated learning theory, transformative learning theory, and the dynamic systems model of role identity. Our findings, based on self-reported data, show that students who facilitated informal physics programs positively developed their physics identity, experienced increased sense of belonging to the physics community, and developed 21st century career skills. Specifically, students reported positive benefits to their communication, teamwork and networking, and design skills. The benefits of these programs can be achieved by departments of any size without significant commitment of funds or changes to curriculum.

We investigated physics students’ behavior in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze and explain their results. Another was provided with only the problem and asked to design and execute the experiment, interpret the data, and draw conclusions. These two approaches involved different levels of student inquiry and they have been described as guided and open inquiry, respectively. The latter gave students more opportunities to practice “designing experiments,” one of the six major learning outcomes in the recommendations for the undergraduate physics laboratory curriculum by the American Association of Physics Teachers. Qualitative analysis was performed of the audio transcripts to identify emergent themes and it was augmented by quantitative analysis for a richer understanding of student behavior. An important finding is that significant improvements can be made to undergraduate laboratories impacting student behavior by increasing the level of inquiry in laboratory experiments. This is most easily achieved by requiring students to design their own experimental procedures.