Studies examining gender differences in introductory physics show a consensus when it comes to a gender gap on conceptual assessments; however, the story is not as clear when it comes to differences in gendered performance on exams. This study examined whether gendered differences exist on midterm and final exams in introductory physics courses and if such differences were correlated with a gender difference in final course grades. The population for this study included more than 10 000 students enrolled in algebra- and calculus-based introductory physics courses between Spring 2007 and Spring 2019. We found a small but statistically significant difference, with a weak effect size, in final letter grades for only one out of four courses: algebra-based mechanics. By looking at midterm exam grades, statistically significant differences were noted for some exams in three out of four courses, with calculus-based electricity and magnetism being the exception. In all statistically significant cases, the effect size was small or weak, indicating that performance on exams and final letter grades was not strongly dependent on gender. As an added dimension examining gendered differences, we investigated if differences exist when accounting for instructor gender. Additionally, a questionnaire was administered in Fall 2019 to more than 1600 students in both introductory sequences to explore students’ perceptions of performance, class contributions, and inclusion. We observed some differences between students’ perception of their performance and contribution when grouped by gender, but no difference on perception of inclusion.

Item banks are generally considered the basis of a new generation of educational measurement. In combination with specialized software, they can facilitate the computerized assembling of multiple pre-equated test forms. However, for advantages of item banks to become fully realized it is important that the item banks store a relatively large number of valid test items. In this paper, we demonstrate how the Rasch model is used for integrating new items into an existing wave optics item bank. First, we identified and applied a set of criteria for selecting 18 linking items from our initial item bank. In order to integrate 12 newly developed items, we combined the 18 linking items with the 12 newly developed ones into one test and administered this test to 106 postinstruction physics students from 4 universities in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was determined that the 12 new items measure the same construct as items from the initial item bank. In addition, all items exhibited good item fit, item reliability was excellent and person reliability was fair. The ratio of standard deviations of linking item difficulties for the new test and existing item bank amounted to 0.89 and correlation of these difficulties amounted to 0.93 which indicated good linking precision. We could conclude that good linking precision can be obtained if linking items are chosen based on the following set of criteria: number of items, item fit, range and spacing of item difficulties, content representativeness, position in test form and interuniversity DIF contrasts.

We discuss the development and validation of a conceptual multiple-choice survey instrument called the survey of thermodynamic processes and first and second laws (STPFaSL) suitable for introductory physics courses. The survey instrument uses common student difficulties with these concepts as resources in that the incorrect answers to the multiple-choice questions were guided by them. After the development and validation of the survey instrument, the final version was administered at six different institutions. It was administered to introductory physics students in various traditionally taught calculus-based and algebra-based classes in paper-pencil format before and after traditional lecture-based instruction in relevant concepts. We also administered the survey instrument to upper-level undergraduates majoring in physics and Ph.D. students for benchmarking and for content validity and compared their performance with those of introductory students for whom the survey is intended. We find that although the survey instrument focuses on thermodynamics concepts covered in introductory courses, it is challenging even for advanced students. A comparison with the base line data on the validated survey instrument presented here can help instructors evaluate the effectiveness of innovative pedagogies designed to help students develop a solid grasp of these concepts.

We conducted a semester-long ethnographic study of group work in a physics class that implemented the investigative science learning environment approach. Students’ conversations were videotaped while they were engaged in group learning activities. Our primary research goal was to better understand what factors made some groups more effective than others. We developed a coding scheme that uses particular modality markers such as hedging and upward inflection to identify how students position themselves in these group conversations. Additionally we quantified group effectiveness by how many key ideas in a particular activity a group negotiated and resolved through the course of their conversation. This research builds on theories of social positioning that posit that groups are more effective when their discussion is more equitable. Our exploratory study indicates that groups whose participants position themselves in a more equitable way, are more effective at completing challenging physics activities and resolving areas of confusion that arise.

The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a widely used multiple-choice instrument measuring a student’s conceptual understanding of electricity and magnetism. This study applied modified module analysis (MMA) and modified module analysis—partial (MMA-P), network analytic methods that identify groups of correlated responses, to CSEM data from two institutions ($N=2538$ and 3595). In module analysis, groups of correlated responses are called “communities.” As in previous applications of MMA and MMA-P to mechanics conceptual inventories, a number of communities related to physics concepts and some communities related to the structure of blocked items in the inventory were identified. An item block is a set of items all referring to each other or to a common stem. Many blocked communities involved responses where the response to the later item would be correct if the response to the earlier item was correct. This suggests a modified scoring rubric for the CSEM is needed to account for these connections between items. A modified scoring rubric is proposed; however, the modified overall average scores changed by less than 1%. The communities of incorrect responses to the CSEM related to physical concepts had varied explanations. These explanations ranged from seemingly straightforward errors (the electric field pointing to higher potential or reversing the right-hand rule), to misconceptions about Newton’s 2nd and 3rd laws carried over from mechanics, to naive reasoning conflating general topics in electricity and magnetism. The identification of incorrect communities allowed the computation of misconception scores showing how prevalent the misconceptions were in the classes studied.

A large body of research shows that using interactive engagement pedagogy in the introductory physics classroom consistently results in significant student learning gains; however, with a few exceptions, those learning gains tend not to be accompanied by more expertlike attitudes and beliefs about physics and learning physics. In fact, in both traditionally taught and active learning classroom environments, students often become more novicelike in their attitudes and beliefs following a semester of instruction. Furthermore, prior to instruction, men typically score higher than women on conceptual inventories, such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), and more expertlike on attitudinal surveys, such as the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), and those gender gaps generally persist following instruction. In this paper, we analyze three years of pre-post matched data for physics majors at Virginia Tech on the FCI and the CLASS. The courses were taught using a blended pedagogical model of peer instruction, group problem solving, and direct instruction, along with an explicit focus on the importance of conceptual understanding and a growth mindset. We found that the FCI gender gap decreased, and both men and women showed positive, expertlike shifts on the CLASS. Perhaps most surprisingly, we found a meaningful correlation between a student’s post-CLASS score and normalized FCI gain for women, but not for men.

Effective faculty professional development must be participant centered; tailored to the needs and interests of the faculty who engage in it. In order to better understand those needs and interests, we investigate how knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and teaching practice vary among new physics faculty, using surveys of a large sample ($n=442$) of participants in the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop (NFW). The “innovation-decision model” guides our understanding of the evolution of faculty teaching practice, and “self-determination theory” and the “theory of planned behavior” inform our understanding of necessary preconditions for that change. We find that most new physics faculty are aware of published teaching approaches, but that this awareness has not increased compared to a decade ago [C. Henderson and M. H. Dancy, Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 5, 020107 (2009)] and is lower than the experienced faculty in our sample. New physics faculty also value student-centered instruction, are interested in using it, and feel that there is peer support for using student-centered instruction. Some new faculty have experienced student-centered instruction as a student or teaching assistant, as well. They are not confident of their ability to enact such practices, however, showing that self-efficacy is an important target for faculty learning. New physics faculty also reported high levels of use of student-centered practice which were similar to experienced faculty in this study and similar or higher than a study from a decade ago. Overall, our results suggest a continued shift in norms in the physics community, such that most new physics faculty enter the professoriate needing minimal encouragement to try student-centered instruction, having already experienced and experimented with such techniques. We do find, however, that about 20% of new faculty are not as open to student-centered instruction and have not yet experimented with it, and that more of these faculty are at Ph.D.-granting institutions. We propose that the innovation-decision model might be best imagined as cyclical, with faculty moving forward and backwards along stages of the cycle as they experiment with their teaching. We recommend those creating professional development experiences for faculty explore opportunities to support faculty as agentic learners engaged in a process of lifelong learning by helping them develop self-efficacy, agency, and metacognition. One way to accomplish these goals might be to focus professional development on faculty choosing something new to try, and (critically) learning from the experience. We also encourage the field to move away from focusing research and professional development on specific, branded teaching practices.

This theoretical paper defines and explores the concepts of transductive links and transductive chains, as part of the theoretical framework of social semiotics. Social semiotics stems from the multimodal framework, which provides a theoretical perspective, constructs, and a language to describe a shift of semiotic material within or between semiotic systems, such as rewriting a text or moving from a function to a plot. Within this framework a shift of semiotic material between two such systems is referred to as a transduction. This paper aims to expand on the concept of transduction by identifying a theoretical contribution to the modeling of this process, referred to as a transductive link. This link is suggested to affect the transduction process and the resulting learning experience. For example, when plotting measurement data, a computer program can be employed to read the data and to transform the data into pixel information. In this case, programming, or the act of programming, acts as a link between the two resources in the transduction process—a transductive link. In other cases, multiple transductions can be performed one after another resulting in these links creating what we define as a transductive chain. By observing and analyzing the use of different semiotic systems in different learning situations, transductive links and chains can be identified and examined. From this identification one has the possibility to find weak links in the transductive chain and address them accordingly. As such, we suggest that transductive links and chains are powerful tools to be able to understand students’ learning experiences.

Upper-division physics students solve partial differential equations in various contexts in quantum mechanics courses. Separation of variables is a standard technique to solve these equations. We investigated students’ solutions to midterm exam questions and utilized think-aloud interviews. We also applied a framework that organizes students’ problem-solving process into four stages: activate, construct, execute, and reflect. Here we focused on students’ problem-solving process for two typical problems in the context of quantum mechanics: an energy eigenfunction problem in two spatial dimensions and a time evolution problem in one spatial dimension. We found that the students encountered various difficulties when they used the separation of variables technique to solve these partial differential equations. Common difficulties included recognizing when separation of variables is the appropriate method, deriving the correct separated equations from the original equation, deciding the signs of the separation constants, justifying when using the summation form of the wave function, and using an effective reflecting tool for their final solutions. In addition, we observed qualitatively and quantitatively different errors in students’ solutions to the two problems. Finally, we discussed the possible implications of our findings for instruction.

Physics lab instruction is evolving in response to changing technology, a desire to better prepare students for diverse careers, and renewed focus from physics education researchers. To prepare researchers to evaluate progress in instructional labs in the future, this study set out to understand the current state of instructional physics labs in North America. Using information collected from instructors intending to use two research-based lab assessments, we evaluate the reach, organization, goals, and pedagogies from over 200 unique instructional lab courses at over 100 institutions. We find significant diversity in all aspects evaluated, with some trends in course pedagogy based on course goals and level. Namely, courses that aim to reinforce concepts, develop lab skills, or do both incorporate varied levels of agency and modeling in their instruction, with differences in first year and beyond-first year courses. We hope these analyses will be useful for instructors to situate their own courses in the national landscape and for researchers to evaluate changes in lab instruction in the future.

Scientific writing, in the form of lab notebooks, proposals, and reports, is a common element of physics lab classes. Multiweek student-designed projects are growing in popularity, especially in advanced lab courses, and writing may play a unique role in these types of courses. In prior work, we developed a framework of possible goals for writing in physics lab classes. Here, we use that framework as a lens through which to view three different advanced lab courses that include student-designed projects. We conduct a multiple case-study analysis to investigate how these courses incorporate writing to address various goals. We find that both the timescale and the open-ended nature of projects present unique opportunities for having students engage in authentic writing practices.

Physics lab courses are integral parts of an undergraduate physics education, and offer a variety of opportunities for learning. Many of these opportunities center around a common learning goal in introductory physics lab courses: measurement uncertainty. Accordingly, when the stand-alone introductory lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) was recently transformed, measurement uncertainty was the focus of a learning goal of that transformation. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ), a research-based assessment of student understanding around statistical measurement uncertainty, was used to measure the effectiveness of that transformation. Here, we analyze student responses to the PMQ at the beginning and end of the CU course. We also compare such responses from two semesters: one before and one after the transformation. We present evidence that students in both semesters shifted their reasoning in ways aligned with the measurement uncertainty learning goal. Furthermore, we show that more students in the transformed semester shifted in ways aligned with the learning goal, and that those students tended to communicate their reasoning with greater sophistication than students in the original course. These findings provide evidence that even a traditional lab course can support valuable learning, and that transforming such a course to align with well-defined learning goals can result in even more effective learning experiences.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In developing and modifying a course called Intuitive Quantum Physics for nonscience majors, several social and theoretical commitments informed our design decisions. We believed that the goal of a general education course should not be acquiring content knowledge alone, but more generally developing an approach to thinking scientifically. Thus, our course was designed to promote a deeper understanding of the nature of science through careful attention to students’ personal epistemologies. We emphasized everyday situations, be they social activities or personal experiences, as analogies to be used during instruction. We used these everyday events to help students make sense of quantum physics, choosing the topic exactly because it seems otherwise counterintuitive. Through this work, we hoped to help students make connections between complex topics (in this case in science) and their everyday experiences.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] When disseminating curricula, typically only the physical curriculum materials are transferred from the instructor to another. However, left as artifacts in the curricula are a set of epistemological beliefs held by the creators and designers of the materials. These epistemological beliefs are often underpinning the activity structures and strongly influence how the curriculum materials are implemented in the classroom, particularly when those beliefs differ from those activated by the instructor. In this paper, we articulate three epistemological beliefs that are built into the University Modeling Instruction curriculum that are essential for running the large-group discussions, which are a crucial part of the curriculum. We highlight how these beliefs are built into the student-facing and instructor-facing curricular materials and the influence of these beliefs in the interpretation and implementation of the curriculum materials. Finally, we discuss the implications on curriculum dissemination, on the adoption and adaptation of curriculum materials, and training models for instructors beyond the curriculum designers.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Common models of curricular development in physics education research (PER) have typically involved a hierarchical relationship between researchers and students, where researchers lead the design and testing of curriculum for students. We draw from work in students as partners and related fields in order to codesign curriculum in partnership with students. Such work has the potential to disrupt typical hierarchical relationships and interactions between students and faculty by involving students in the process of making curricular decisions. We invited undergraduate students to participate in a partnership to codesign a set of curricular materials for topics in quantum mechanics that students often struggle with. Four undergraduate students, one PER graduate student, and one PER faculty member met for a series of codesign meetings. We collected videotapes of the meetings, written artifacts, and meeting reflections. This paper presents a fine-grained analysis of one interaction in which researchers attempted to create space for students to contribute to decision making about how the collaboration should proceed. Through analyzing the complex dynamics of how participants negotiated decision-making space, including characterizing the types of decisions that were made, we describe how access to those decisions were opened up or cut off, and how those decisions contested or reaffirmed participants’ roles. Working towards partnership is a complex and messy process: attempts to open up space for some forms of decision making closed off access to other forms of decision making. In some ways, the interactions between the participants also reified the traditional student and faculty roles that the partnership had intended to disrupt. Through closely analyzing these dynamics, we aim to self-critically reflect on the challenges and tensions that emerge in codesign partnerships. We discuss our own areas for growth and speak to implications for more responsible partnerships.

A growing body of research-based instructional materials for quantum mechanics has been developed in recent years. Despite a common grounding in the research literature on student ideas about quantum mechanics, there are some major differences between the various sets of instructional materials. In this article, we examine the major instructional considerations that influenced the development of two comprehensive quantum mechanics curricula: Paradigms in Physics (the junior-level physics courses at Oregon State University) and Tutorials in Physics: Quantum Mechanics (a set of supplementary worksheets designed at the University of Washington). The instructional considerations that we consider vary in nature: some are philosophical or theoretical commitments about teaching and learning, while some are practical structures determined in part by the local instructional environments. We then use these instructional considerations as a lens to explore example activities from each curriculum and to highlight prominent differences between them, along with some underlying reasons for those differences. The Paradigms reflect a case where the theoretical commitments drove changes to the practical structures while the Tutorials reflect how theoretical commitments were incorporated into a course with a relatively fixed practical structure. Partially as a result of this large-scale difference, we find that each curriculum prioritizes different theoretical commitments about how to promote student understanding of quantum mechanics. We discuss instances of both alignment and tension between the theoretical commitments of the two curricula and their impact on the instructional materials.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Fifteen years ago, following recommendations from research on science education for prospective teachers and for students more broadly, Physics and Everyday Thinking introduced activities within an inquiry-based undergraduate physics course that explicitly focus on the nature of science and nature of learning. This component of the curriculum is referred to as learning about learning. Since then, this same team developed a series of other curricula. These later curricula, Physics and Everyday Thinking (2nd ed.), Physical Science and Everyday Thinking, Learning Physics, Learning Physical Science, and Next Generation Physical Science and Everyday Thinking all retain a focus on learning about learning as a priority. While similar theoretical grounding guided development across all these curricula, this particular component evolved considerably. These changes were motivated by practical considerations, developments in research, changes to the K-12 expectations, and changes in physics departments, as well as changes to the team. We introduce the term responsive curriculum development to describe the changes made to this aspect of the curricula. With responsive curriculum development, the development process is responsive to contextual, social, and policy factors so that the materials remain relevant and adaptable in diverse contexts and time periods.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The overarching goal of this paper is to illustrate the interplay between theory, design principles, and curriculum (meant broadly, to include both written and enacted curriculum). This dialogue is illustrated in the context of the design and implementation of a particular curricular unit on thermodynamics intended for advanced secondary students in Italy. The approach to the discipline and design of learning materials that we take in this work challenges a conventional view of physics disciplinary content as hierarchically organized and instead promotes a multidimensional and thematically organized physics curriculum. In this paper, we emphasize not only the influence of theory on design, but also the reverse influence: how the analysis of specific classroom data from enactments of a designed curriculum can contribute to refining and building a local theory of how to learn and teach physics in a way that is inclusive and responsive to classroom diversity.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Developing a solid understanding of simple electric circuits represents a major challenge to most students in middle school. In particular, students tend to reason exclusively with current and resistance when analyzing electric circuits as they view voltage as a property of the electric current and not an independent physical quantity. As a result, they often struggle to understand the important relationship between voltage and current in electric circuits. Following diSessa’s interpretation of learning as the construction and reorganization of previously loosely connected elements of knowledge (“p-prims”) into a coherent mental structure (“coordination class”), a new curriculum was developed that systematically builds on students’ everyday experiences with air pressure (e.g., with air mattresses and bicycle tires). In order to make voltage rather than current the students’ primary concept when analyzing electric circuits, voltage is introduced as an “electric pressure difference” across a resistor that is as much the cause for an electric current as air pressure differences are the cause for air flow. The objective of the curriculum is to provide a structure for students to develop a qualitative understanding of simple dc circuits that allows them to make intuitive inferences about the electric current based on voltage and resistance. With an effect size of $d=0.94$ the new curriculum has proven to be more effective than traditional approaches for teaching electric circuits in a quasi-experimental field study with 790 students from Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Although curriculum design has a long tradition in physics education research (PER), it is often criticized for unclear or inconsistent methodologies. One reason is that the theory-into-practice aspect frequently remains blurred. Only a few curriculum projects have given insight into the rule-guided translation of learning theories into curricula and curriculum materials. This paper reports how design-based research (DBR) was used as a framework for systematic curriculum development during a six-year-long project on a middle school optics curriculum. One key feature of DBR is to deduce design principles from theoretical and empirical foundations, apply them in the creation of a curriculum, and refine them in response to data collected during successions of implementation. The design principles guide and structure the iterative cycles of design—intervention—redesign and make a systematic and nevertheless flexible design process transparent. We provide the level of detail needed to make clear how design principles were developed and applied in the creation of the optics curriculum. In addition, we use many examples to illustrate how and why the initial set of design principles was refined. We report the results of a large scale evaluation of the curriculum that shows its superiority to conventional instruction. Finally, we summarize the lessons learned during this project. This shall support other scholars in designing and implementing curricula.