This study aims to examine the effectiveness of metacognitive scaffolding in different inquiry tasks related to optics. Two high school classes participated in this study. One class, the treatment group ($n=33$), which integrated metacognitive prompts into the simulation-based inquiry, was compared to the other class, the control group ($n=34$), which received only simulation-based inquiry. Students’ conceptual understanding, integrated science process skills, confidence judgment, and inquiry performance were measured using a multiple-choice pretest and post-test and worksheets. The results show that the students’ conceptual understanding and confidence judgments on conceptual understanding in both groups significantly increased from the pretest to the post-test. Incorporating metacognitive scaffolds into inquiry-based learning better facilitated the improvement of integrated science process skills as well as the confidence judgment on the process skills, especially in the more complex tasks. The metacognitive scaffolding could be applied to various inquiry activities to enhance students’ control of variables, data interpretation, and graph comprehension.

Despite the growing presence of students as partners (SAP) in education research and the overlap of goals with learning assistant (LA) programs, there is little research done on pedagogy- and curriculum-focused student partnerships that involve LAs. LAs have expertise as both teachers and learners, so why not leverage this expertise to improve the underlying structure and teaching philosophy of future offerings of a course? We intend to investigate this idea in the case of a flipped, introductory physics course at Michigan State University by conceptualizing its LA program as a model for enacting SAP using the communities of practice (COP) framework. Using an interpretivist case study approach, we found in this environment that (i) the LAs experienced a learning trajectory within P-Cubed that resembled attainment of central membership in a COP, (ii) the development of a specific practice among LAs resembled the evolution of practice in a community of practice, and (3) LAs have a strong level of influence over decision making on curriculum and pedagogy in P-Cubed in a way that is indicative of authentic student partnership. This input is particularly important for a specific type of partnership: curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy, which requires significant participation and say so from LAs. Reconceiving LA programs as student partnerships opens a path to incorporate students into and reinforce sustainable curriculum change.

Research in undergraduate physics and in K–12 science education has demonstrated challenges and successes in facilitating student engagement with reasoning practices associated with professional physicists. Here we focus on one important dimension of physics reasoning, using evidence to revise models. While this topic has been explored at the undergraduate level, less is known about younger students’ physics reasoning, especially within the context of modeling and model revision, where measurement tools are less emphasized and where evidence is often observational qualitative data. Here we examine 7th graders’ conversations about pieces of observational scientific evidence in their conceptual models of magnetism. We present a series of cases from a whole class discussion to illustrate students’ productive reasoning using evidence while revising, challenging, and testing their scientific models. These cases illustrate how students reason about evidence in the context of canonical and noncanonical models of magnetism, specifically when different pieces of evidence contradict each other and when running the model is inconclusive. The results capture a variety of complex ways evidence can be productively used in reasoning with models, and, more importantly, show that middle school students’ reasoning shares important similarities with more advanced physics reasoning, which can be leveraged when designing and building future instruction.

Access and performance in advanced high school physics have been persistently inequitable when considering student ethnicity and gender. This quasiexperimental, observational study examined access and performance of students in four Advanced Placement (AP) Physics courses in 2018–2019: AP Physics 1 ($N=150451$), AP Physics 2 ($N=20466$), AP Physics C Mechanics ($N=49951$), and AP Physics C Electricity & Magnetism ($N=21602$); this analysis utilized an intersectional lens of ethnicity and gender in identifying enrollment and performance disparities. Descriptive and inferential analyses were conducted to determine whether the distribution of student ethnicities and genders of students who took the examinations was similar to that of U.S. schools. Further analyses were conducted to determine whether achievement on AP Physics examinations varied by 14 unique intersectional groups characterized by gender and ethnicity. Results indicated that AP Physics 1 was a relatively accessible course, though enrollment disparities among genders, ethnicities, and intersectional groups grew as the AP Physics courses became more advanced with physics and/or calculus prerequisites or corequisites. There were large decreases in course enrollments from first- to second-year AP Physics courses, particularly for women who were also underrepresented ethnic minorities. In terms of performance, AP Physics 1 had the lowest overall weighted average, with the majority of students failing the examination. Women who were traditionally underrepresented ethnic minorities were found to have failure rates of over 80% on the AP Physics 1 examination, and failure rates near 50% for AP Physics 2 and the AP Physics C courses compared to nonminority men who had approximately half the failure rates. In most cases, men outperformed women who shared their ethnicities. These results present opportunities for physics education policy makers and researchers to design interventions for students in intersecting marginalized social groups, many of whom have disproportionately low representation and achievement in advanced high school physics, which occurs at a critical juncture in the physics pipeline.

Across the field of education research there has been an increased focus on the development, critique, and evaluation of statistical methods and data usage due to recently created, very large datasets and machine learning techniques. In physics education research (PER), this increased focus has recently been shown through the 2019 Physical Review PER Focused Collection examining quantitative methods in PER. Quantitative PER has provided strong arguments for reforming courses by including interactive engagement, demonstrated that students often move away from scientistlike views due to science education, and has injected robust assessment into the physics classroom via concept inventories. The work presented here examines the impact that machine learning may have on physics education research, presents a framework for the entire process including data management, model evaluation, and results communication, and demonstrates the utility of this framework through the analysis of two types of survey data.

We surveyed a national sample of United States physics faculty about the COVID-19 transition to online learning. Most faculty had 1–2 weeks to prepare and no experience with teaching online. They relied on department peers to discuss approaches and used lecture adaptations such as video conferencing rather than new curricular elements. Their responses were empathetic to the students’ situation, and 90% believed they were average or above at implementing online instruction. Faculty’s preference for local resources and existing methods suggests that in a crisis, strong network ties will dominate as information sources, with consequences for professional development and instructional change.

We conducted a quasiexperimental study in order to investigate the effect of a teaching concept on quantum physics based on coincidence and correlation experiments with heralded photons on preuniversity students’ conceptions of quantum physics (experimental group, $N=150$). We compare the results with the traditional curriculum’s effect (control group, $N=130$) at German secondary schools using a questionnaire to assess students’ conceptions of quantum physics adapted from the literature. The results show that students introduced to quantum physics using the quantum optics concept acquire conceptions of quantum physics that are significantly less influenced by classical mechanistic and deterministic conceptions than those of the control group. In more detail, correlation and principal component analysis results indicate that the conceptions acquired by experimental group students are more consistent than those of the control group students.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted every aspect of academic activity, including the informal education and public engagement efforts of physics departments and institutions. As part of a large-scale national survey of the landscape of informal physics education programs, we have conducted a series of short interviews with directors and facilitators for a variety of programs in order to create a snapshot of whether and how programs have been able to adapt to the challenges and risks of the pandemic. Broadly, we find that programs are struggling to maintain any activity at all, and that those programs still in operation have relied largely on the efforts of individual director or facilitators to make substantial adaptations. Additionally, we find that those programs that have been most successful in maintaining activity benefit from strong, ongoing institutional support; we present the findings of this study both to complement existing research on formal spaces and to advocate for the continued support of informal physics education, which continues to play a crucial role in connecting departments to the public.

This review presents an overview and analysis of the body of research on special relativity theory (SRT) education at the secondary and lower undergraduate level. There is currently a growing international interest in implementing SRT in pre-university education as an introduction to modern physics. For this reason, insights into learning opportunities and challenges in SRT education are needed. The field of research in SRT education is still at an early stage, especially at the level of secondary education, and there is a shortage of empirical evaluation of learning outcomes. In order to guide future research directions, there is a need for an overview and synthesis of the results reported so far. We have selected 40 articles and categorized them according to reported learning difficulties, teaching approaches, and research tools. Analysis shows that students at all educational levels experience learning difficulties with the use of frames of reference, the postulates of SRT, and relativistic effects. In the reported teaching sequences, instructional materials, and learning activities, these difficulties are approached from different angles. Some teaching approaches focus on thought experiments to express conceptual features of SRT, while others use virtual environments to provide realistic visualization of relativistic effects. From the reported teaching approaches, three learning objectives can be identified: to foster conceptual understanding, to foster understanding of the history and philosophy of science, and to gain motivation and confidence toward SRT and physics in general. In order to quantitatively compare learning outcomes of different teaching strategies, a more thorough evaluation of assessment tools is required.

Women are underrepresented at multiple levels of physics education. One avenue for understanding the classroom experiences that perpetuate underrepresentation is physics identity, defined using the three dimensions of recognition, performance, and competence. Existing literature suggests that women tend to have a much weaker physics identity than men and that women tend to report a lower sense of competence in the form of self-efficacy than their male peers. This study examined confidence and self-efficacy as an aspect of physics identity in an AP Physics 1 class using a mixed-methods, sequential explanatory design. The quantitative data consisted of students’ actual and predicted scores on in-class assessments, which showed no statistically significant difference in the accuracy of students’ self-assessments by race or gender. To identify classroom activities that impacted self-efficacy, we collected responses to an open-ended prompt and conducted student interviews. Labs emerged as having both a positive and a negative impact on self-efficacy on many students, regardless of race or gender and male students were more likely to discuss peer-to-peer interactions as a source of self-efficacy. Boys also described figuring out how to apply concepts from labs to problem sets as an experience that contributed to their self-efficacy, while the only girl who mentioned problem sets described them as a negative experience. When describing evidence their teacher believed they are good at physics, boys focused on assessments where they had high scores, while girls focused on the feedback on assessments where they had low scores.

This research focuses on the absence of women among academic staff in physics. To explore the causes of this gender imbalance, we focus on the decision-making junction between obtaining a Ph.D. diploma and pursuing a postdoctoral position. We use the mixed-methods paradigm, combining a nationwide representative survey of Ph.D. students in Israel ($n=267$ respondents out of 404 questioned) and interviews with Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows ($n=38$). The theoretical novelty that we propose is to view such career decision making as a “deal” that involves contextual, organizational, and individual variables and their intersection. Young women are examining the components of this deal: what it offers them and what prices they will have to pay, but their decision is made within a gendered power structure. Studying both context factors and agency, we reveal the multiple hidden ways in which gender operates as a power structure, putting up barriers to women’s academic careers. This latent power structure influences women’s decision making and experiences in several ways. In the academic field, it produces unequal competition in a male-dominated playground. In the social sphere, choosing a demanding academic career is seen as disrupting gender order. Within the family, women carry a greater burden of family work and give precedence to their husband’s career and preferences. Within this social structure, women who decide to follow an academic career feel that they must excel, and this demand for “excellence” acts as a hidden mechanism within the gendered power structure that may prevent talented women from pursuing an academic career in physics.

In this study we characterize student procrastination habits and investigate associations between these habits and student performance on graded course components, student beliefs about their own procrastination behavior, and gender. The procrastination habits of calculus-based introductory physics students are measured via the amount of time before the assignment deadline or “completion time” that students submit their work on relatively short ($>30\min$) weekly online assignments. With the aid of latent profile analysis, we find that one can meaningfully categorize students into 4 completion time classes that clearly distinguish students between their mean completion time, their week-to-week completion time patterns, assignment completion rates, mean course grades, and proportion of women. Consistent with many studies in a variety of contexts, we find that procrastinating students tend to have lower course grades. Closer examination of exam and nonexam grade components reveals that completion time is directly associated with the nonexam component, but its association with the exam component is weaker and completely mediated by the nonexam component grade. This is in contrast to student ACT score, which is strongly associated with exam component but only weakly associated with the nonexam component, and the direct association of ACT with the exam scores is only weakly mediated by nonexam scores. Further, we find that ACT score is at best very weakly correlated with completion time. Taken together this supports the idea that exam and nonexam components are separately predicted by the two somewhat “orthogonal” measures of ACT score and completion time, and we propose that these are measuring so-called cognitive and noncognitive factors, respectively. Regarding gender differences, we found that on average women tended to procrastinate less than men, submitting the assignments on average 8 h earlier than men. Considering previous studies documenting that women tend to score higher than men on nonexam components, we found that completion time completely mediates the gender differences in nonexam components, providing support for the hypothesis that procrastination mediates the gender differences in performance on nonexam components. Finally, we found that the overwhelming majority (90%) of students did not strategically (“actively”) intend to delay completion of the assignment, and that students who did indicate actively delaying were 2–3 times more likely to receive a D or E in the course.

Physics lab instructors were forced to adapt their courses in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate the impact these changes had on student views towards experimental physics as measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). Analysis of the responses from over 1600 students in both spring and fall semesters and performing a comparison with the same courses in 2019 shows that student total E-CLASS scores were not lower in 2020 compared to 2019. Nevertheless, in the Fall 2020 data, we find that there is a variation in the mean E-CLASS scores on some individual questions when compared to previous years.

We report on an investigation of student thinking about steady-state pipe flow of an incompressible fluid. About 250 undergraduate engineering students were given a test consisting of two hydrodynamics questions, combining multiple-choice format with subsequent open-ended explanations. There is substantial evidence that students have difficulty applying and prioritizing the two basic principles of mass conservation (expressed in the continuity equation) and energy conservation (i.e., Bernoulli’s equation). When faced with questions that involve gravity, dissipative effects (“friction”), or a visible pressure drop, a considerable number of students did not invoke the continuity equation in situations where applying it is a necessary step for arriving at the correct answer. Instead, even after lecture instruction on this topic, many of the first-year students based their answers on ill-supported assumptions about local pressures. Some of them used formal arguments from a simplified Bernoulli equation (“lower pressure means higher velocity”), while others based their answer on intuitive arguments (“higher pressure leads to higher velocity”). We also found reasoning based on analogies to single-particle motion (“flow velocity decreases when flowing upwards or friction is present”). Contrary to other researchers, we did not see any evidence for the hypothesis that students think of water as a compressible fluid. Instead, students’ answers often indicate a lack of understanding of the conservation of mass or its implications for incompressible fluids or of the role that this principle plays in the context of fluid flow. In addition, our data indicate that some students have more general difficulties in describing and reasoning about technical situations, such as applying equations containing multiple variables, distinguishing spatial differences in a quantity from its changes with respect to time, or realizing the meaning of idealizations. We also present some evidence that different levels of activation of students during instruction influence the prevalence of these difficulties and discuss some implications for instruction.

In this study, we evaluate the impact of rehearsing teaching skills in a mixed-reality classroom simulator on graduate teaching assistants’ (GTAs) instructional practices as well as undergraduate student learning outcomes. The simulator training is intended to provide GTAs opportunities to deliberately practice essential pedagogical skills that support active learning, specifically in the context of the combined tutorial and laboratory sections of an algebra-based introductory physics sequence. Over three semesters, GTAs participated in different numbers of simulator rehearsal sessions: no simulator training, one session, and four sessions. We conducted 109 classroom observations for 23 GTAs, using a modified version of the Laboratory Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (LOPUS); we also documented the frequencies of questioning-related skills (e.g., cold calling) implemented by the GTAs. Undergraduate student learning outcomes were measured by pre- and posttests of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM). To classify and characterize GTAs’ instructional practices, we conducted a hierarchical cluster analysis and found three instructional styles: the small-group facilitator, the whole-class facilitator, and the waiter. The results suggest that four-session simulator training throughout a semester supported GTAs (i) to shift away from the style of the waiter toward the whole-class facilitator, and (ii) to implement posing questions and cold calling techniques. While new GTAs were found to have more interactive behaviors than experienced GTAs in the semester with no simulator training, we found that four-session simulator training supported both new and experienced GTAs to use more interactive instructional styles and to implement questioning-related skills more frequently. Although the results demonstrate the effectiveness of simulator training, our analysis also indicates areas for improvement. GTAs tended to shift away from the style of the small-group facilitator toward the whole-class facilitator when they participated in four-session training, and the weekly implementations of questioning-related skills decreased over the course of a semester despite an increased total implementation. In addition, student learning outcomes in different semesters (with different numbers of simulator rehearsal sessions) did not show a statistically significant difference. However, GTAs’ instructional styles were correlated with student performance on FCI posttest with a small effect size when controlling for FCI pretest scores and lecture instructors; no correlation was found between GTAs’ instructional style and student performance on the CSEM posttest. We conclude with a discussion of factors that may have led to the success of the simulator training as well as strategies to further enhance the effectiveness of the simulator training.

As recent advancements in physics and astronomy rewrite textbooks in a very rapid pace, there is a growing need in keeping abreast of the latest knowledge in these fields. Reading preprints is one of the effective ways to do this. However, by having journal clubs where people can read and discuss journals together, the benefits of reading journals become more prevalent. We present an investigative study of understanding the factors that affect the success of preprint journal clubs in astronomy, more commonly known as Astro-ph/Astro-Coffee (hereafter called AC). A survey was disseminated to understand how universities and institutions from different countries implement AC. We interviewed 9 survey respondents and from their responses, and we identified four important factors that make AC successful: commitment (how the organizer and attendees participate in AC), environment (how conducive and comfortable AC is conducted), content (the discussed topics in AC and how they are presented), and objective [the main goal(s) of conducting AC]. These four factors are shown to correlate with each other. We also present the format of our AC, an elective class which was evaluated during the Spring semester 2020 (March 2020–June 2020). Our evaluation with the attendees showed that enrollees (those who are enrolled and are required to present papers regularly) tend to be more committed in attending compared to audiences (those who are not enrolled and are not required to present papers regularly). In addition, participants tend to find papers outside their research field harder to read, which makes introducing and explaining basic knowledge without the assumption of the audience already knowing the topic very important. Finally, we showed an improvement in the weekly number of papers read after attending AC of those who present papers regularly, and a high satisfaction rating of our AC. We summarize the areas of improvement in our AC implementation, and we encourage other institutions to evaluate their own AC in accordance with the four aforementioned factors to assess the effectiveness of their AC in reaching their goals.

One argument for keeping the physics Graduate Record Exam (GRE) is that it can help applicants who might otherwise be missed in the admissions process stand out. In this work, we evaluate whether this claim is supported by physics graduate school admissions decisions. We used admissions data from five Ph.D.-granting physics departments over a 2-year period ($N=2537$) to see how the fraction of applicants admitted varied based on their physics GRE scores. We compared applicants with low GPAs to applicants with higher GPAs, applicants from large undergraduate universities to applicants from smaller undergraduate universities, and applicants from selective undergraduate institutions to applicants from less selective undergraduate institutions. We also performed a mediation and moderation analysis to provide statistical rigor and to better understand the previous relationships. We find that for applicants who might otherwise have been missed (e.g., have a low GPA or attended a small or less selective school), having a high physics GRE score did not seem to increase the applicant’s chances of being admitted to the schools. However, having a low physics GRE score seemed to penalize otherwise competitive applicants (i.e., applicants with mid to high GPAs). Thus, our work suggests that the physics GRE does not, in fact, help applicants who might otherwise be missed stand out.

Students’ motivational beliefs about physics can influence their learning outcomes as well as retention in their majors and career choices. Moreover, due to societal stereotypes and biases about who belongs in physics and can succeed in physics, women often have lower motivational beliefs about physics than men. The expectancy-value theory emphasizes the importance of self-efficacy and value in predicting students’ short- and long-term academic and professional outcomes, but there are few studies focusing on how the learning environment shapes these motivational beliefs of women and men. Investigating how the perception of learning environment in introductory physics courses for the engineering, physical science, and mathematics majors in their first year of college predicts the motivational beliefs of women and men can be useful in making the learning environments equitable and inclusive so that the underrepresented students, e.g., women, are not disadvantaged. In this study, we adapt prior identity framework to investigate how the learning environment (including sense of belonging, perceived peer interaction, and perceived recognition) predicts students’ physics self-efficacy, interest, and identity by controlling for their self-efficacy and interest at the beginning of a calculus-based introductory physics course. We surveyed 1203 students, 35% of whom identified as women. We found signatures of inequitable and noninclusive learning environment in that not only were female students’ physics self-efficacy and interest lower than male students’ at the beginning of the course, but the gender gaps in these motivational constructs became even larger by the end of the course. Analysis revealed that the decrease in students’ physics self-efficacy and interest were mediated by the learning environment and predicted students’ physics identity. We find that the perceived recognition played a major role in predicting students’ physics identity, and students’ sense of belonging in physics played an important role in explaining the change in students’ physics self-efficacy.

We used a sequential synthesis problem to investigate novice teachers’ conceptual difficulties in hydrodynamics. Twenty-one new secondary level physics teachers from various regions of China, who had been in service for no more than 2 years, participated in the study. Each participant completed a written hydrodynamics problem consisting of four questions, all of which were related to a situation about water flowing in a long, nonuniform tube of different cross sections, heights, and orientations. Analysis of the teachers’ written performances exposed a number of errors. To further investigate their underlying notions about hydrodynamics, we conducted one-on-one interviews with 13 teachers selected randomly from those making such errors on the written test. The interviews revealed three major categories of errors about hydrodynamics held by our novice teachers. These relate to (a) ontological confusions and misuse of properties associated with solid, liquid, and gas; (b) deficient perceptions of force-motion and work-energy analysis; and (c) mischaracterizations about the nature of Bernoulli’s equation and the quantities therein. Here, we not only replicated some of the literature-reported misconceptions but also uncovered new ontological notions of hydrodynamics held by physics teachers, an underresearched population on this topic.