Women are underrepresented in physics. Because of the structure of the Japanese educational system, more women must choose physics as a subject for university entrance exams to increase the number of women studying advanced physics at university. In this study, we investigated the factors influencing girls’ choice of physics for university entrance examination in Japan, focusing on preference and self-efficacy for science subjects. We investigated two Japanese populations (members of the public who graduated from university with a degree in science, and professional physicists) to identify characteristics of physicists. We conducted online retrospective questionnaires. First, we found that the preference for physics at junior high school and the first year of high school were positively related to the choice of physics for university entrance exams in both female and male university science graduates. Second, we found that preferences for museums and science magazines as well as the recognition of the importance of physics and mathematics at elementary or junior high school were significantly related to the choice of physics for female university science graduates. Third, we found that professional physicists, especially women, had a lower mathematical stereotype than male and female university science graduates. Our results suggest that initiatives to prevent girls from disliking physics at junior high school or high school may be important for encouraging them to choose physics for university entrance examination in Japan.

The experiment that we present in this paper explores the teaching of Galilean motion principles observed in different reference frames, in an astronomical context. All grade 10 students in a French high school (the lycée Condorcet, Val de Marne) participated in two successive teaching-learning sessions, designed within the theoretical framework of embodied cognition. The learning material consisted of two versions of a spatiotemporal aspect map of the Solar System that allowed students to enact and observe trajectories from different points of view. The first was a printed, paper model (PO) that was used individually on a table. The other was a human version (HO). Thus, students enacted movements with either their fingers (PO) or their bodies (HO). Both sessions (HO or PO) used the same activities to illustrate the movements of Earth, Mars, and the Sun during a 24-h and 1-yr period, observed from different reference frames (terrestrial, geocentric, or heliocentric). Students’ conceptual understanding was tested using a questionnaire, which was administrated before and after each session, and three months later. The questionnaire described three situations in which the motion of an object is observed from two different points of view. We expected students to understand that speed and distance traveled were different in both cases. Our initial results suggest that the sessions did have a significant and lasting effect on students’ understanding of the dependence of motions on reference frames. While the degree of embodiment (HO or PO) does not seem to affect conceptual learning, the abstract operation of moving from one reference frame to another is facilitated when one has physically and repeatedly lived it.

Communities develop social languages in which utterances take on culturally specific situated meanings. As physics students interact in their classroom, they can learn the broader physics community’s social language by co-constructing meanings with their instructors. We provide an exposition of a systematic and productive use of idiosyncratic, socially acquired language in two classroom communities that we consider to be subcultures of the broader community of physicists. We perform a discourse analysis on twelve quantum mechanics students, two instructors, and the course text related to statements about basis and change of basis within a spin-$½$ probability problem. We classify the utterances’ grammatical constructions and situated meanings. Results show that students and instructors’ utterances referred to a person, calculation, vector being in, or vector written in a basis. Utterances in these categories had similar situated meanings and were used similarly by the students and instructors. Utterances referred to change of basis as changing the form of a vector, writing the vector in another way, changing the vector into another vector, or switching bases. Utterances in these categories had varying situated meanings and were used similarly by the students and instructors. The students and instructors often switched between different discourse types in quick succession. We found similar utterance types, situated meanings, and grammatical constructions across students and instructors. The textbook’s discourse sometimes differed from the discourse of the students and instructors. Within this study, the students and instructors were from two universities, yet they spoke similar utterances when referring to basis and change of basis. This gives evidence to their shared social language with a broader community of physicists. Integrating and leveraging social languages in the classroom could facilitate students’ enculturation into the classroom and broader professional community.

We describe how young students situate themselves with respect to astronomy through an identity framework that features four dimensions: interest, utility value, confidence, and conceptual knowledge. Overall, about 900 Italian students, from 5th to 9th grade (9–14 years old), were involved in the study. We tested our model using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Differences between girls and boys and across school levels were also investigated. Results show that interest has both a direct and an indirect effect on astronomy identity. The indirect effect of interest on identity is mediated by utility value. Moreover, confidence mediates the effect of interest on conceptual knowledge. Concerning differences between girls and boys, we found that the effect of interest on identity is greater for girls than for boys and that the utility value mediates the effect of interest on identity for boys but not for girls. Finally, our findings show also that the students’ interest in astronomy and confidence in their performance decrease with age, with a potential negative impact on conceptual knowledge and future career choice in astronomy. The astronomy identity framework can be employed to examine the role of affective variables on performance and persistence in astronomy and to improve the design of teaching-learning activities that can potentially stimulate a lasting interest in astronomy.

Our aesthetic response to the Universe, and the complexity of concepts through which we understand it, are inherently bound together in how we meaningfully interpret its nature. Over millennia the abstracted and intangible concepts of science have been developed and communicated through a rich array of representations across a variety of modes. The interpretation of such representations is a complex multidimensional and multimodal endeavor. This is particularly an issue in education where novices can struggle to engage with unfamiliar canonical representations. Learning in a discipline can be characterized as a process of developing disciplinary discernment in apprehending and using these representational systems. Using representations concerning the geometry of the Universe, evolution of the Universe, and cosmological expansion as examples, this paper provides an in-depth overview of the various multimodal representations through which concepts in cosmology are understood and communicated. In so doing this work unpacks the salient features of these representations in order to develop an underlying framework which we call the anatomy of representations (AOR). This study, in reviewing and analyzing representations in cosmology, explores this landscape of cosmology representations. This will allow for the characterization of how semiotic resources are mobilized, changed, and connections are made between various representational modes and levels, and an exploration of the landscape of cosmology and cosmology education. The AOR framework is intended as a guide for educators, including textbook authors, to support the development and interpretation of representations.

This paper extends prior work establishing an operationalized framework of mathematical sense making (MSM) in physics. The framework differentiates between the object being understood (either physical or mathematical) and various tools (physical or mathematical) used to mediate the sense-making process. This results in four modes of MSM that can be coordinated and linked in various ways. Here, the framework is applied to novel modalities of student written work (both short answer and multiple choice). In detailed studies of student reasoning about the photoelectric effect, we associate these MSM modes with particular multiple choice answers, and substantiate this association by linking both the MSM modes and multiple choice answers with finer-grained reasoning elements that students use in solving a specific problem. Through the multiple associations between MSM mode, distributions of reasoning elements, and multiple-choice answers, we confirm the applicability of this framework to analyzing these sparser modalities of student work and its utility for analyzing larger-scale ($N>100$) datasets. The association between individual reasoning elements and both MSM modes and MC answers suggest that it is possible to cue particular modes of student reasoning and answer selection. Such findings suggest potential for this framework to be applicable to the analysis and design of curriculum.

Resources theory assumes that resource activation is context sensitive, and that an important dimension of context is the question students are answering. The context sensitivity of resource activation has been demonstrated empirically by case studies that show students using different resources to answer questions that are similar in focus. In this paper, we further substantiate and add specificity to the field’s understanding of the context sensitivity of resource use by demonstrating a pattern in resource activation for questions about mechanical pulse propagation, superposition, and reflection. In particular, our analysis shows a pattern in the kinds of resources students use to answer different styles of questions about the same physics topic. Questions that ask for a prediction tend to elicit rules or procedures, while questions that ask students to explain an observation elicit these plus ideas about force, energy, and motion. Our results call both researchers’ and instructors’ attention to the style of question that they ask and the impact it has on the resources commonly cued for students.

Polarization of light is one of the topics in the Croatian high school physics curriculum. It is taught in the final year of high school education. Twenty-seven Croatian high-school students (aged 18–19 years) were interviewed after regular instruction about their understanding of polarization of light and the model of light itself. This paper reports on the observed students’ reasoning strategies and conceptual difficulties. Some of the reported difficulties correspond with previously identified difficulties, but some new difficulties were also found. Students often based their explanations on the remembered but misinterpreted common schematic representations of polarization. Explanations seemed to be created on the spot, suggesting the absence of prior models of polarization.

We designed a rubric to assess free-response exam problems in order to compare thinking skills evidenced in exams in classes taught by different pedagogies. The rubric was designed based on Bloom’s taxonomy and then used to code exam problems. We have analyzed historical and recent exam problems in both algebra-based and calculus-based exams. In particular, we have examined cases where the same problem was administered on exams taught by different pedagogies. In some cases, we were able to compare different sections of the algebra-based physics course taught by the same instructor, sometimes during the same semester, one with inquiry-based instruction and the other in a more traditional lecture environment. We discuss the development of the instrument and present results. The inquiry-based students consistently demonstrated use of the thinking skills coded at least as often as the traditional students, and usually more often.

Introductory university astronomy courses have emerged as a powerful opportunity to improve science understanding, literacy, and appreciation of the scientific method to a wide range of future citizens and voters. Students in an introductory astronomy course were instructed to record and analyze their naked-eye astronomical observations over a semester (13 weeks). The effect this activity had on students’ learning of basic astronomy concepts and attitudes towards astronomy and science were measured using an astronomy concept diagnostic test and attitudes survey administered at the start and at the end of the semester, and compared with a similar introductory astronomy course that did not include the observing assignment. The results suggest that the observing diary is a positive learning experience for the majority of students, and that completing this assessment assists in developing students’ deeper engagement with astronomy and astronomy concepts. We recommend the use and assessment of observing diaries as an effective learning activity in introductory astronomy classes.

Introductory physics lab courses serve as the starting point for students to learn and experience experimental physics at the undergraduate level. They often focus on measurement uncertainty, an essential topic for practicing physicists and a foundation for more advanced lab learning. As such, measurement uncertainty has been a focus when studying and improving introductory physics lab courses. There is a need for a research-based assessment explicitly focused on measurement uncertainty that captures the breadth of learning related to the topic, and that has been developed and documented in an evidence-centered way. In this work, we present the first step in the development of such an assessment, with the goal of establishing the breadth and depth of the domain of measurement uncertainty in introductory physics labs. We conducted and analyzed interviews with introductory physics lab instructors across the US, identifying prevalent concepts and practices related to measurement uncertainty, and their level of emphasis in introductory physics labs. We find that instructors discuss a range of measurement uncertainty topics beyond basic statistical ideas like mean and standard deviation, including those connected to modeling, another lab learning goal. We describe how these findings will be used in the subsequent development of the assessment, called the Survey Of Physics Reasoning On Uncertainty Concepts In Experiments (SPRUCE).

The purpose of this study is to validate the physics affective characteristics scale (PACS) by investigating its psychometric properties. The PACS is a revised version of the affective characteristics scale (ACS), which was developed for Turkish students following introductory physics courses. The questionnaire includes 51 items in 11 subscales: situational interest in physics, personal interest in physics, relevance of physics to everyday life, relevance of physics to future career, relevance of physics to other courses, physics course anxiety, physics test anxiety, student motivation in physics, self-efficacy in physics, self-concept in physics, and physics achievement motivation. In this version, the relevance subscale—named as importance subscale in the previous version—was revised, and the aspiring extra activities related to physics subscale was removed. The PACS was administered to 240 nonphysics (biology and pharmacy) majors enrolled in an introductory physics course at a Flemish university. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the factor structure of the questionnaire. The results showed that the model fits well indicating that the revised questionnaire also has satisfactory psychometric properties, and supporting a multidimensional relevance construct. As expected, the indicators all showed significant positive factor loadings. The results of this study suggest that the Dutch version of the PACS is a useful instrument with sufficient reliability and validity to measure nonphysics majors’ affective characteristics.

Traditional, template physics labs are often associated with student dissatisfaction and superficial applications, and are known to leave students with fragmented knowledge. An alternative known as labatorials, a conceptually driven approach to labs, has been proposed. In a number of studies, labatorials have been shown to work well. However, what has been missing is a study comparing labatorials to traditional labs. In this study, labatorials are compared with traditional labs in terms of students’ learning experience and the quality of their conceptual learning. Additionally, we identify the scaffolding mechanisms that impact these elements. In the context of Concordia University’s introductory experimental mechanics course, we collect data spanning semistructured student and teaching assistant (TA) interviews, class observations, TA surveys, post-test and final exam scores and responses, and student writing products. Upon analysis and triangulation, we find that due to the scaffolding present in labatorials, students typically exhibit a high degree of collaboration and engagement with the material in a low-pressure environment, which allows students to focus on the learning. This is attributed to three primary forms of scaffolding inherent to the design of labatorials: peer scaffolding, instructor scaffolding, and scaffolding by the activity worksheet. In contrast, students in traditional labs have a tendency to rely on step-by-step instructions and focus on avoiding errors, which may inhibit their conceptual learning. These conclusions are supported by the students’ differing performance and understanding exhibited in different types of questions; traditional lab students tend to perform better on questions involving standardized processes or simple, memorization-based calculations, while labatorial students tend to perform better on conceptual questions.

A performance gap between the genders has been observed on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) almost since its introduction. Many studies have sought to characterize this gender gap, however, few have tested the consistency of the factor structure across the genders. This study fills in this gap by offering the first piece of evidence that the genders (male and female due to data constraints) are interacting with the FCI in similar manners. Using multigroup measurement invariance techniques, a preinstruction sample of 6238 males and 2874 females, and a postinstruction sample of 6338 males and 2955 females, the latent variable structure of the FCI was tested for consistency between the genders. As this technique is not often used by the physics education research community, significant time was spent explaining the methodology. It was found that the Eaton and Willoughby five-factor modified (EW5M) model of the FCI factor structure exhibited strict invariance between the genders. Additionally, a single-factor model showed strong invariance and partial strict invariance for the FCI. Latent means from the EW5M model revealed that females underperform compared to males across all of the factors of the FCI, but these gaps in performance decreased over the course of instruction, however, some differences are still large. The results of this study suggest observed performance differences on the FCI between the genders may not be due to gender specific factor structure differences. However, this result is sample dependent and should be verified by other studies using different, independent samples.

We show how learning can be improved, beyond that shown in actively taught classrooms, by also transforming the homework using the principles of deliberate practice. We measure the impact of transforming the homework on student learning in a course that had already implemented an active approach to teaching in class. We compare performance on the same final exam in equivalent cohorts of students over three semesters of an introductory physics course: the first taught with traditional lectures and traditional homework, the second taught with active instruction coupled with traditional homework, and the last taught with both active instruction and transformed homework. We find students in the semester where both active teaching and transformed homework are used scored significantly higher on the final exam than the students taught actively but with traditional homework. This learning gain achieved by transforming the homework is comparable to that achieved by replacing traditional lectures with active teaching strategies in class. We further show the positive effects of transforming the homework on student learning through a shorter, controlled experiment. When everything but the homework implementation is controlled, students scored 5%–10% higher on a test of learning following transformed homework compared with traditional homework. This significant improvement to learning occurs despite students spending a similar amount of time on task. This study represents an initial step towards understanding how deliberate practice can be extended to improve pedagogy beyond what happens in the classroom to the out-of-class homework.

Causal reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process that supports a wide range of learning activities such as making predictions and inferences, explaining phenomena, and drawing conclusions. In physics learning, causal reasoning plays an important role in developing conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills. This study builds off the existing work to investigate aspects of students’ causal reasoning in understanding Newton’s third law. Quantitative assessment is conducted to explicitly probe four attributes of causal reasoning including the causal relation between a pair of interaction forces, magnitudes of interaction forces, the time order of interaction forces, and the action-reaction language. Interviews are also conducted to identify details of students’ reasoning pathways. The subjects of this study include high school and college students from China. The results suggest that after instruction on Newton’s third law many students still hold a belief of causal relation between the pair of interaction forces. Further analysis on students’ response patterns and interviews suggests that students’ belief in causality is strongly associated with asymmetries in scenario contexts due to dominant features, the scenario timeline, and the action-reaction language. In addition, the results also demonstrate a progression of four developmental levels of causal reasoning that each reveals a set of unique thinking pathways for using the asymmetries in reasoning to determine causality. The findings of this study suggest that the lack of correct causal reasoning may cause students to develop fragmented conceptual understanding, which should be addressed in future research and instruction. Detailed analysis of the findings and educational implications on assessment and instruction are discussed.

Diagnostic tests for placing students into appropriate courses are commonly used in higher education math and science departments. We found no physics education research examining the validity of such exams, how well they are placing students into appropriate courses, and what guidance these exams can give for better focusing instruction. In this study, we present criteria by which to evaluate the validity and value of a diagnostic test, and we then apply these to the test developed for physics course placement at Stanford University. We examine the data collected from the first year in which all students intending to enroll in an introductory physics course were required to take the test and received an email suggesting which course would best match their level of preparation based on their score. We found that most students followed this advice. We also found that the diagnostic test score was a good predictor of performance in both the introductory physics course for physics majors and the course targeting science and engineering majors. It was not a good predictor of performance in two other courses, likely due to lack of alignment between course objectives and diagnostic measures. We found many individual questions which were particularly discriminating in predicting performance in the various courses, suggesting specific topics on which instruction should focus. We found that 27 of the 38 questions were predictive of performance in at least one of the courses studied, and only 8 questions that were not predictive of course performance or did not show any difference between students enrolled in different courses. These results provide evidence for the validity and usefulness of our diagnostic test, and we offer it to instructors at other institutions who might find it of value.

This study examines students’ visual behaviors when they tackle two types of synthesis problems, sequential and simultaneous problems. Sequential synthesis tasks can be solved by applying pertinent concepts consecutively, whereas simultaneous synthesis tasks require concurrent application of multiple concepts. Twenty-two students from an introductory calculus-based physics course participated in the study. We used an eye-tracker to record the students’ eye movements when they silently reflected on how to solve the problems and subsequently when they talked aloud their problem-solving strategies. We found that the students made more gaze transitions between text and diagram for the simultaneous problems than for the sequential ones. However, they spent more time looking at the diagram and making within-diagram eye transitions in the sequential tasks than in the simultaneous tasks. Further, most students invoked two concepts to solve the sequential tasks but only one for the simultaneous tasks. These findings indicate that the students made less effort to link text and diagram in solving sequential problems but frequently attempted to integrate information within each diagram. The pattern for the simultaneous problems appeared to be reversed. Our results suggest that different types of synthesis (i.e., sequential and simultaneous) may differentially influence the ways students handle tasks. As suggested by the eye-tracker data and confirmed by the participants’ verbal explanations, students tend to divide the situation in sequential problems into subtasks but treat simultaneous problems as a single-step task.

The purpose of this study was to explore how students with high- and low-prior-knowledge employed multiple representations in argumentation evaluation and generation tasks. The argumentation performance and eye-movement behaviors of 96 college students in these tasks were investigated. The number of participants who proposed complex argumentation levels and the argumentation accuracy was higher in the high-prior-knowledge group than in the low-prior-knowledge group. Moreover, the high-prior-knowledge group demonstrated greater eye-movement transitions between representations compared with the low-prior-knowledge group. Both groups had greater transitions in the generation task than the evaluation tasks. The high-prior-knowledge group distributed attention to representations with more flexibility, revealing that they were more aware of the task requirements and more able to employ multiple representations for arguments. In the argumentation evaluation tasks, the high-prior-knowledge group performed referencing behaviors in the reading sequences between representation text and equation and between representation table and figure, whereas the low-prior-knowledge group was inclined to look back and forth between representation text and table. In the argumentation generation task, the two groups displayed similar reading sequences. It indicated that learners with higher knowledge may perceive the similarity between homogeneous representations and constrained interpretations of the complex representations by using easier representations, or further integrated representations to achieve deeper understanding, which then improved their argumentation performance. The implications of instructions for improving learners’ argumentation skills in a multirepresentational display are discussed.

Introductory mechanics is an obligatory course for many disciplines outside of physics and the failure rate is often high. Even the students who pass the course often fail to achieve the main learning goal: The conceptual knowledge required for modeling situations with physics principles. In many cases, this is due to inefficient learning strategies. However, little work has been done on the integration of learning strategies into physics courses. Here we present a study where we integrated three established learning strategies into the teaching of an introductory mechanics course: elaborative encoding, retrieval practice, and self-explanation. We also developed three scaffolding tools to facilitate the integration of the strategies: elaborative encoding questions, a hierarchical principle structure, and a problem-solution structure with emphasis on physics modeling. The overarching aim of this study is to use students’ experience-based reflections to find ways to improve the integration of the learning strategies. To fulfill this aim, we seek answers to the following three interrelated research questions: (i) What are the students’ experiences and associated reflections with the learning strategies and tools? (ii) How do the students’ experiences and reflections align with established theory on the learning strategies? (iii) What main barriers to effective implementation of the learning strategies may be hypothesized? To answer these questions, we did semi-structured research interviews with 12 students. Through the thematic analysis, we found that retrieval practice was used extensively while self-explanation and elaborative encoding was partly or wholly ignored. The analysis, together with theoretical considerations, indicates that successful implementation of elaborative encoding is critical for maximizing the benefits from retrieval practice in physics. We also present some promising findings on two of the tools: (i) Students’ extensive use of the hierarchical principle structure and (ii) that some students started practicing physics modeling after exposure to the solution structure. Finally, we offer suggestions for how to overcome the barriers to effective implementation of each of the learning strategies.