[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In the “standard” physics education research curriculum-development model, researchers are cast primarily as producers of curricula and instructors are cast primarily consumers, i.e., adopters and adapters. We illustrate a complementary model in which researchers’ curricular modules, and also their “pure” research unattached to curriculum development, can serve as instructionally generative fodder that inspires and loosely guides instructors in creating their own curricular materials. Drawing on experiences from our graduate student days, we show how particular curricula and research papers influenced our curriculum development and instruction in particular ways. We then argue that the physics education ecosystem could benefit if researchers were more intentional about creating potential instructionally generative fodder, and we suggest ways to do so. Although not intended to replace the standard curriculum-development model, which has a history of producing effective tutorials and other curricular modules, our alternative model casts the researcher and instructor as co-equal contributors to the research-based yet creative process of curriculum generation.

The goals for lab instruction are receiving critical attention in the physics education community due to multiple reports and research findings. In this paper, we describe a theoretically motivated scheme to evaluate instructional lab curricula and apply that scheme to three implementations of an electricity and magnetism lab curriculum. The scheme has three components: (1) that critical thinking is a context-dependent process for using critical thinking skills to make evidence-based decisions (2) that to make decisions one must have agency and (3) that deliberate practice can be used to effectively teach critical thinking skills. We use this scheme to evaluate the lab instructions for three sets of instructional labs for their use of deliberate practice for teaching critical thinking skills through varied opportunities for students to exercise agency in making decisions about experiments. Our analysis shows that our curricular design did target the experimentation-focused critical thinking skills, but did not strongly align with theoretical recommendations for deliberate practice. The results provide suggestions for improvements to curricular design. For curriculum developers, instructors, and researchers who intend to teach critical thinking in the context of experimental physics, this scheme serves as a tool to create and evaluate lab instructions in terms of the ways in which specific skills are supported through deliberate practice.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] We argue that teaching learning sequence (TLS) design needs to be further developed through the explicit articulation of methodology, which comprises the theoretical commitments regarding research and how those give rise to methods for design, implementation and assessment. In this study we propose design based research (DBR) as a methodology to conduct systematic and iterative studies of the design and assessment of educational interventions (such as materials and strategies) as solutions to complex problems in educational practice. This methodology does not specify theoretical commitments regarding the nature of learning and how those give rise to teaching strategies, but the articulation of those commitments is expected as part of the justification for decision making in the design process. In order to demonstrate the framework, we present an example of TLS development in the context of introductory electrostatics and dc circuits. We describe the evaluation of the TLS over three years of implementation, addressing both the capacity of the TLS for involving students in learning the topic and the students’ learning itself.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This paper discusses the theoretical framework and curriculum materials that form the basis of the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach to learning and teaching physics. ISLE, as a philosophical approach to learning, has two core intentionalities: (i) We want students to learn physics by thinking like physicists; by engaging in knowledge-generating activities that mimic the actual practices of physics and using the reasoning tools that physicists use when constructing and applying knowledge. (ii) The way in which students learn physics should enhance their well being. These intentionalities form the basis upon which we build a bricolage of multiple theoretical perspectives. We will show how the ISLE approach and its implementation is shaped by (a) the epistemological commitments of physics, (b) the findings of cognitive science, (c) theories of learning communities, and (d) the perspective of universal design. We will present both qualitative and quantitative data that demonstrate the effectiveness of ISLE in helping students to achieve our intentionalities. We conclude with a call to curriculum developers and implementers to explicitly articulate their intentionalities and theoretical perspectives so that we may forge deeper connections between educational theories, curriculum development, and implementation.

This article describes the redesign of a project-based course on soft and biological materials to include computational modeling. Including the construction of computational models in the course is described as a shift from constructivism—a theory that characterizes the development of formal reasoning, to constructionism—a theory that focuses on learning while constructing artifacts. This shift ameliorated two drawbacks in the original course: the limited conceptualization of entropy resulting from an unproductive use of the disorder metaphor, and the dependence of most students on the teacher for writing theoretical explanations for their final papers. In the redesigned curriculum, computer simulations provide concrete dynamic representations that students can draw upon for developing nuanced, formal reasoning on entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. In addition, core computational models act as a flexible web that can be extended and modified, and allow a significant proportion of the students to build theoretical models on their own. We conclude that while the new design reflects a shift towards constructionism, we did not adopt a fully constructionist approach, rather a blend of constructivist and constructionist approaches.

This empirical study investigates the main features of curricula and contexts that favor or hinder the process of transfer of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) from the designers’ original situation to a host one. The specific research questions addressed were (RQ1) what were the changes made during the process of transfer in the new context? (RQ2) What were the similarities or differences between the national curricula and contexts that influenced the process of transfer? To answer our research questions, we chose two TLSs, one about optical properties of materials, the other about thermal conductivity, originally designed by two groups of researchers and experienced teachers in Italy and Greece, respectively. The transfer process was analyzed using the “adaptation and reinvention” model, originally developed for the management knowledge research field, while the construct of “institutional distance” was used to describe the influence of country-specific aspects on the transfer process. Data collected included background documents that describe the principles underlying the TLSs design, the decisions and changes made to the original TLSs by the hosting group, and reports on the TLS implementation in classroom practice in the original and in the host context. Content analysis was used to analyze data. Results show that the similarities between the two national curricula and interactions between the involved groups acted mainly as facilitators of the transfer process.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] A level of curricular design, called design tactics, is identified to fill a gap in the research literature between the broad principles that guide curriculum development and the detailed writing of specific activities and lessons. The use of design tactics is illustrated with a case study using a sequence from middle-division undergraduate electromagnetism, the ring cycle, developed as part of the Paradigms in Physics project at Oregon State University. A retrospective analysis of the curriculum development process identified ten design tactics, related to content, sensemaking, and classroom practice. Further analysis of secondary implementations at DePaul University and California State University San Marcos illustrates how design tactics can also be used to make adaptations to local settings and contexts. Design tactics can serve as a productive bridge between higher-level design principles and activity development.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] When we examined student responses to questions about the direction of the static friction force in various situations, we both had strong ideas about how to write a tutorial to promote deeper understanding. But our ideas were quite different. In this theoretical paper, we present the two contrasting tutorials and show how their differences can be traced to different theoretical orientations toward cognition and learning. We do not claim that one tutorial—or the theoretical framework loosely associated with it—is superior. Instead, we hope to illustrate two claims. One, we show in detail how curriculum designers’ cognitive “theories” (frameworks), even if largely tacit during the act of creation, shape the resulting tutorials. Two, we show how, at least for us, articulating and discussing our respective theoretical orientations and their influence on our tutorial writing enables a rethinking of long-standing tutorial-writing habits. We argue that instructional intuition—shaped by explicit and tacit theoretical assumptions—functions well in guiding the design of curriculum, as our contrasting tutorials illustrate; but more systematic attention to the underlying theoretical assumptions can productively inform refinements.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The communities of practice framework has become an essential framework for understanding identity development both in physics education research (PER) and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, more broadly. However, the use of communities of practice as a learning theory that informs curriculum design is significantly less prevalent within the PER community. One possible reason for this is that communities of practice as a theory originated in professional environments and it subsequently moved towards a framework that is centered around informing management practices. Some significant interpretations and negotiations need to be completed in order to apply and to design for communities of practice in the classroom environment. In this paper, we outline an introductory physics course called Projects and Practices in Physics (P-Cubed) that was designed using the communities of practice as a guiding framework. We present the curriculum decisions that focus specifically on the adaption process from professional practice to the classroom context along with the theoretical underpinnings of the curriculum design decisions that went into the development of the P-Cubed classroom.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This paper proposes the rethinking of the division of labor between physics education research curriculum developers and classroom instructors. Historically, both curriculum developers and instructors have taken responsibility for fostering students’ conceptual development, epistemological development, and other learning goals related to physics content knowledge and practices or process skills. By contrast, responsibility for fostering productive group dynamics has been taken up almost entirely by instructors. Tutorial and lab developers structure their materials to be used in small groups, but have not generally designed, tested, and refined their materials to minimize problematic group dynamics. In this paper, we argue that the written tutorial can and should do more to prevent negative group dynamics from arising. To make this claim plausible, we describe an example from our own experience. While revising a tutorial, we noticed some problematic dynamics emerging; one of the students was unfairly blamed for a simulation-setting mistake and was later left out of a conversation. We came up with hypotheses about factors that might have contributed to those dynamics. A few of those factors, we argue, could be addressed in part through tutorial revision. While acknowledging that instructors will always have more capacity and hence more responsibility than curriculum writers to foster productive group dynamics, we call for tutorial writers, during the testing and revision of their materials, to monitor how the tutorial impacts team dynamics and to be transparent (in publications and presentations) about how they modified the tutorial to address problematic dynamics they observed.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] We discuss the theoretical underpinnings that informed the considerations and decisions that shaped the design of a curriculum unit entitled “Electromagnetic radiation—principles, applications, and decisions”. This unit is part (45 h) of the compulsory general science requirement for the Israeli high school matriculation curriculum in science for students who choose not to major in any scientific discipline. Its goal is to develop scientific literacy rather than expertise. During the problematizing phase that preceded the design we identified two challenges presented by the formal goal of the unit and its target audience: (i) how to foster meaningful engagement on the part of diverse groups of “outsiders to science” with complex scientific content such as electromagnetic radiation, (ii) how to translate scientific and engineering findings related to a complex phenomenon such as electromagnetic radiation, which emerge within a context of specialized knowledge and vocabulary, into lay language without corrupting their meaning. The first section of this article explores these questions through a theoretical discussion of (i) relevance, personal relevance, and meaningfulness; (ii) the implications of pursuing personal relevance on the meaning ascribed to scientific literacy of nonscientists, and the ways to support its development in school; and (iii) the ways in which personal relevance comes to bear on the choice of content and explanatory means. We then illustrate how these theoretical principles and insights were translated into curriculum design.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Research in physics education has contributed substantively to improvements in the learning and teaching of university physics by informing the development of research-based instructional materials for physics courses. Reports on the design of these materials have tended to focus on overall improvements in student performance, while the role of theory in informing the development, refinement, and assessment of the materials is often not clearly articulated. In this article, we illustrate how dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making have guided the ongoing development, testing, and analysis of an instructional intervention, implemented at three different institutions, designed to build consistency in student reasoning about the application of Newton’s 2nd law to objects at rest. By employing constructs from cognitive science associated with dual-process theories of reasoning (such as mindware and cognitive reflection), we were able not only to examine the overall improvement in student performance but also to investigate the impact of the intervention on two aspects of productive reasoning—mindware and cognitive reflection. Our analysis showed that the intervention strengthened students’ mindware such that students were able to apply it as a criterion while checking the validity of their intuitive responses. Moreover, logistic regression revealed that the success of our intervention was mediated by the students’ cognitive reflection skills. Indeed, for students with comparable mindware, those who demonstrated a weaker tendency toward cognitive reflection were less likely to initiate conflict detection and therefore never had the opportunity to utilize their mindware. We believe that this kind of integrated, theory-driven approach to intervention design and testing represents an important first step in efforts to both account for and leverage domain-general reasoning phenomena in the learning and teaching of physics.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This manuscript discusses how learning theories have been applied to shape multiple aspects of the design of curricular activities combining interactive computer simulations and University of Washington style tutorials (so-called simulation-tutorials). When considering the curriculum goals (what to teach), we drew on theories of representational competence and learning with multiple representations. When considering how to teach, we drew on theories of constructivism and sketching to learn, leveraging the advantages of sketching as a constructive process that requires students to make their current understanding explicit in visual form, to make specific choices in order to make their ideas concrete, and to organize information to support deep processing. When considering when and why to sketch, we drew upon theories of representational competence, learning with multiple representations and inventing to prepare for future learning to describe six distinct purposes of sketching both prior to and while working with the simulation. This is illustrated by presenting specific sketching tasks to show how theory informed the design and the sequencing of the tasks. We followed a design-based research method, working at two institutions in two countries and with multiple cohorts of students to understand, and where necessary improve, the design of these activities, primarily basing our decisions on the sketches that students had created. The key message of this research is that the design and sequencing of sketching tasks needs to be carefully matched to the pedagogical rationale and that theory can shape these decisions in many ways.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Our investigation of 353 faculty-produced multiple-choice Think-Pair-Share questions leads to key insights into faculty members’ ideas about the discipline representations and intellectual tasks that could engage learners on key topics in physics and astronomy. The results of this work illustrate that, for many topics, there is a lack of variety in the representations featured, intellectual tasks posed, and levels of complexity fostered by the questions faculty develop. These efforts motivated and informed the development of two frameworks: (i) a curriculum characterization framework that allows us to systematically code active learning strategies in terms of the discipline representations, intellectual tasks, and reasoning complexity that an activity offers the learner, and (ii) a curriculum development framework that guides the development of activities deliberately focused on increasing learners’ discipline fluency. We analyze the faculty-produced Think-Pair-Share questions with our curriculum characterization framework, then apply our curriculum development framework to generate (i) fluency-inspiring questions, a more pedagogically powerful extension of a well-established instructional strategy, and (ii) Student Representation Tasks, a brand new type of instructional activity in astronomy that shifts the responsibility for generating appropriate representations onto the learners. We explicitly unpack and provide examples of fluency-inspiring questions and Student Representation Tasks, detailing their usage of pedagogical discipline representations coupled with novel question and activity formats.

Public engagement is an important component of the operation of many physics organizations, such as physics departments. However, comparatively little work has been done to systematize the study of pedagogical approaches in these informal environments, which may contain unique affordances and challenges compared to formal settings. A 2016 study took an important step toward a comprehensive understanding of pedagogy in informal environments by developing a model articulating three so-called “modes of pedagogy,” utilizing cultural-historical activity theory to categorize pedagogy of volunteer instructors. To build upon this model, we have conducted a more thorough study at a University of Colorado Boulder-based informal physics education program, following similar methods but expanding upon the methodology to generate more robust insights into instructors’ pedagogy. The study has produced three major results. First, we have broadly corroborated the findings of the 2016 study, observing similar distributions of enacted pedagogical preferences among our volunteer instructors. Second, we have expanded upon recommendations in the 2016 study for methods of instructor preparation; specifically, we find that presemester training is insufficient to effect a lasting change in instructors’ enacted pedagogy. Third, we have refined the pedagogical modes model presented in that work, moving away from a categorical articulation of the modes in favor of a model where instructors’ pedagogy is characterized by combinations of traits and mediated by their overarching objectives for students. These two novel additions to the pedagogical modes framework allow for a more nuanced and comprehensive characterization of the pedagogical techniques used by instructors in informal learning environments, improving both our understanding of the methods of informal pedagogy and our ability to prepare instructors to succeed.

Scientific abilities rubrics developed at Rutgers University are an assessment and self-assessment tool. They consist of tables, each representing a broad scientific ability (for example, “to collect and analyze data”), the listing of subabilities (for example, “independent and dependent variables are identified”) and the criteria to assess to which degree the subability has been developed. We introduced scientific abilities rubrics to assess student work in the project laboratory, a project-based course where groups of students solve open-ended experimental physics problems. They submit a report in the form of a web page, which is evaluated and returned to the students with feedback on what needs to be improved. These iterations are repeated until the report is deemed acceptable. We present our experience with the rubrics, and the development of a new rubric for the web report. We show that the introduction of the rubrics reduced the workload of the graders, while increasing the quality of the reports. Based on these results we conclude that using scientific abilities rubrics is a very efficient way of assessing experimental project-based work. We also present an analysis of which abilities, assessed by the rubrics, appear to be the most difficult to develop.

Young children, students, and adults may have alternative ideas about the motion of the Sun and stars as we observe them in the sky. However, a good understanding of this apparent motion is essential as a starting point to study more advanced astronomical concepts, especially when these include astronomical observations. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of the apparent motion of Sun and stars (AMoSS) test, which can measure to what extent students have insight into the apparent motion of the Sun and stars. We propose a framework that allows one to compare students’ understanding of the specific aspects of these apparent motions in relation to the time of the day, time of the year, and the observer’s latitude. For each of these aspects, we designed test items for both the Sun and the symmetric apparent motion aspect of the stars. The reliability and validity of the test are established by analyzing answers of both secondary school and university students and by presenting the questions to a panel of experts. We report on the design and validation process and present the final version of the test.

Much work has been done to characterize the reasoning of students as they solve mathematics-intensive problems and characterizing differences in expert and novice problem solving. In this work, we characterize the problem-solving strategies in a classroom setting of “transitioning novices,” students who have completed an introductory physics course and have learned some problem-solving strategies, but are far from expertlike in their reasoning. We find that students mostly use intermediate strategies that reflect an understanding of specific relationships between quantities, such as analyzing the units of an expression, to reason about mathematical expressions. Few students use more sophisticated strategies like checking limits, which require students to run mental simulations to predict how a system will behave as different physical variables are changed. The teaching of more advanced strategies like limit checking will require careful scaffolding of the cognitive complexity, as students generally do not succeed when simply told to check limits. This is supported by the findings of Lin and Singh [Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 7, 020104 (2011)] that careful scaffolding is needed to help students solve more complex problems. In this particular group, students were able to successfully analyze the dimensions of an expression and compute component forces and torques to check if their answer made sense. Our results show that there is a need to recognize and teach these intermediary strategies to enable more novice students to check their answers and encourage students to become more expertlike.