Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to encourage the socialization of information among group members, we utilized a real-world problem where students were asked to generate a well-structured physics task, and investigated how student groups collaborated to create physics problems for younger students at an introductory physics course at a university in northern Chile. Data collection consists of audio recording the group discussions while they were collaborating to develop their physics problems as well as the solutions they created to their problems. Through interviews, we accessed students' perceptions on the task and its challenges. Results suggest that generating problems is an opportunity for students to propose ideas and make decisions regarding the goals of the problem, concepts and procedures, contextual details and magnitudes and units to introduce in their generated problems. In addition, we found evidence that groups tested the validity of their creations by engaging in strategies often observed with algebra-based physics problems, such as mathematical procedures and qualitative descriptions of the physics embedded in the problem, yet groups invested more time with algebra-based strategies compared to more qualitative descriptions. Students valued the open-ended nature of the task and recognized its benefits in utilizing physics ideas into context, which in turn enabled collaboration in a way not experienced with traditional algebra-based problems. These findings support the use of generative activities as a pathway for students to engage in real-world physics problems that allow for a range and variety of collective processes and ideas.
In undergraduate research experiences, student development of an identity as a scientist is coupled to their sense of ownership of their research projects. As a a first step towards studying similar connections in physics laboratory courses, we investigate student ownership of projects in a lasers-based upper-division course. Students spent the final seven weeks of the semester working in groups on final projects of their choosing. Using data from the Project Ownership Survey and weekly student reflections, we investigate student ownership as it relates to students' personal agency, self-effic…
Conceptual inventory surveys are routinely used in education research to identify student learning needs and assess instructional practices. Students might not fully engage with these instruments because of the low stakes attached to them. This paper explores tests that can be used to estimate the percentage of students in a population who might not have taken such surveys seriously. These three seriousness tests are the pattern recognition test, the easy questions test, and the uncommon answers test. These three tests are applied to sets of students who were assessed either by the Force Conce…
The research reported in this article represents a systematic, multi-year investigation of student understanding of the behavior of bipolar junction transistor circuits using a variety of different tasks to isolate and probe key aspects of transistor circuit behavior. The participants in this study were undergraduates enrolled in upper-division physics electronics courses at three institutions, as well as undergraduates in upper-division engineering electronics courses at one of the institutions. Findings from this research indicate that many students have not developed a robust conceptual und…
Student learning in upper division thermal physics has not been studied to the same extent as in other courses like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. Studies addressing reasoning and learning at the graduate level are even more limited. In this study, we conducted think-aloud interviews with eight graduate students involving questions centered around a set of entropy related conceptual tasks, two of which are similar to tasks presented to undergraduates in other studies. We discuss patterns in student reasoning on each question then discuss themes that appeared across questions. We ident…
Quantum entanglement is a central concept of quantum theory for multiple particles. Entanglement played an important role in the development of the foundations of the theory and makes possible modern applications in quantum information technology. As part of the QuVis Quantum Mechanics Visualization Project, we developed an interactive simulation "Entanglement: The nature of quantum correlations" using two-particle entangled spin states. We investigated student understanding of entanglement at the introductory and advanced undergraduate levels by collecting student activity and post-test respo…
Quantum mechanics is challenging even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Dirac notation is a convenient notation used extensively in quantum mechanics. We have been investigating the difficulties that the advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with Dirac notation. We administered written free response and multiple-choice questions to students and also conducted semi-structured individual interviews with 23 students using a think-aloud protocol to obtain a better understanding of the rationale behind their responses. We find that many students struggle with Dirac notat…
The American Physical Society calls on its members to improve the diversity of physics by supporting an inclusive culture that encourages women and Black, Indigenous, and people of color to become physicists. In the current educational system, it is unlikely for a student to become a physicist if they do not share the same attitudes about what it means to learn and do physics as those held by most professional physicists. Evidence shows college physics courses and degree programs do not support students in developing these attitudes. Rather physics education filters out students who do not ent…
Visualizations in interactive computer simulations are a powerful tool to help students develop productive mental models, particularly in the case of quantum phenomena that have no classical analogue. The QuVis Quantum Mechanics Visualization Project develops research-based interactive simulations for the learning and teaching of quantum mechanics. We describe efforts to refine the visual representation of a single-photon superposition state in the QuVis simulations. We developed various depictions of a photon incident on a beam splitter, and investigated their influence on student thinking th…
Research suggests that students often have difficulty transferring their learning from one context to another. We examine upper-level undergraduate and graduate students' facility with questions about the interference pattern in the double-slit experiment (DSE) with single photons and polarizers of various orientations placed in front of one or both slits. Before answering these types of questions, students had worked through a tutorial on the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) in which they learned about interference of single photons when polarizers of various orientations are placed in the t…
Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of troubleshooting. However, that work has focused primarily on individual students' metacognitive processes or troubleshooting abilities. In contrast, electronics courses often require students to work in pairs, and hence students' in-class experiences likely have significant social dimensions that are not well understood. In this work, we use an existing framework for …
Quantum mechanics is challenging even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. In the Schrödinger representation, the wave function evolves in time according to the time dependent Schrödinger equation. The time dependence of the wave function gives rise to time dependence of the expectation value of observables. We have been exploring the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with time dependence of expectation values in quantum mechanics. We have developed and administered conceptual free response and multiple-choice questions to students to investigate …
Historically, the implementation of research-based assessments (RBAs) has been a driver of educational change within physics and helped motivate adoption of interactive engagement pedagogies. Until recently, RBAs were given to students exclusively on paper and in-class; however, this approach has important drawbacks including decentralized data collection and the need to sacrifice class time. Recently, some RBAs have been moved to online platforms to address these limitations. Yet, online RBAs present new concerns such as student participation rates, test security, and students' use of outside…
Homework in introductory physics represents an important part of a student's learning experience; therefore choosing the manner in which homework is presented merits investigation. We performed three rounds of clinical trials comparing the effects of mastery-style homework vs traditional-style homework with students in both algebra-based and calculus-based introductory mechanics. Results indicate a benefit from mastery-style over traditional-style homework, principally for weaker students who are less familiar with the material being covered and on questions that are nearer transfer to the stu…
There is a large variety of goals instructors have for laboratory courses, with different courses focusing on different subsets of goals. An often implicit, but crucial, goal is to develop students` attitudes, views, and expectations about experimental physics to align with practicing experimental physicists. The assessment of laboratory courses upon this one dimension of learning has been intensively studied in US institutions using the Colorado Learning Attitudes Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). However, there is no such an instrument available to use in Germany, and the in…
We report on the study of student difficulties regarding heat engine in the context of Stirling cycle within upper-division undergraduate thermal physics course. An in-class test about a Stirling engine with a regenerator was taken by three classes, and the students were asked to perform one of the most basic activities---calculate the efficiency of the heat engine. Our data suggest that quite a few students have not developed a robust conceptual understanding of basic engineering knowledge of the heat engine, including the function of the regenerator and the influence of piston movements on t…
We explore the overlap of two nationally-recognized learning outcomes for physics lab courses, namely, the ability to model experimental systems and the ability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning apparatus. Modeling and troubleshooting are both nonlinear, recursive processes that involve using models to inform revisions to an apparatus. To probe the overlap of modeling and troubleshooting, we collected audiovisual data from think-aloud activities in which eight pairs of students from two institutions attempted to diagnose and repair a malfunctioning electrical circuit. We characterize the cognit…
Peer Influence on Physics Self-Efficacy and Grades: A comparative study of students in an introductory calculus-based course who typically worked alone or in groups before and during the pandemic
Recognizing the underlying relationship between e-learning practice and the institutional environments hosted in, the Chinese educational practice on branching high school students into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM academic major groups before being admitted into universities or colleges is examined. By extending the well-established Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with computer self-efficacy, this study aims to examine the difference in perceptions and behaviours on e-learning adoption from the STEM and non-STEM students. The results revealed that ST…
Investigating student interpretations of the differences between classical and quantum computers: Are quantum computers just analog classical computers?
Despite the difficult circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemics, physics students can tackle interesting questions that are part of physics competitions as the German Physicists' Tournament (GPT) 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemics in 2020, many competitions such as the GPT are held online. Furthermore, the usual options of equipment offered by the supervising university institutions could not be used by the students. The problems of the GPT 2020 therefore had to be chosen in such a way that they could be examined at home using simple means. One of these supposedly simple but profound experi…
Introductory Physics Students in Algebra-based Courses Who Typically Worked Alone or in Groups: Insights from Gender-Based Analysis before and during COVID-19
We have been investigating the difficulties that students in upper-level undergraduate courses have in determining the probability distribution for measuring energy and position as a function of time when the initial wave function is explicitly given. We administered written free-response and multiple-choice questions to investigate these difficulties. We find that students have common difficulties with these concepts. We discuss some of the findings.
University buildings are significant closed built environments for COVID-19 spreading. As universities prepare to re-start in-class activities, students' adherence to physical distancing requirements is a priority topic. While physical distancing in classrooms can be easily managed, the movement of students inside common spaces can pose higher risks due to individuals' proximity. This paper provides an experimental analysis of unidirectional student flow inside a case-study university building, by investigating students' movements and grouping behaviour according to physical distancing require…
"Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. We have been investigating the extent to which introductory physics students can diagnose their own mistakes when explicitly asked to do so with different levels of scaffolding support provided to them. In our study in an introductory physics class with more than 200 students, the recitation classes were split into three different experimental groups in which different levels of guidance were provided for performing the …
In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific documentation and how researchers come to learn these practices in experimental physics. Using interviews with practicing researchers, namely physics graduate students, we explore the different experiences researchers had in learning how to effectively use a notebook for scientific documentation. We find that very few of those interviewed thought that their undergrad…
Investigating High School and Pre-High School Teachers' Perceptions and Experiences Introducing Quantum Concepts: A Survey of QuanTime and other Quantum-related Activities
Undergraduate physics education has greatly benefited from the introduction of computational activities. However, despite the benefits computation has delivered, we still lack a complete understanding of the computationally integrated learning experience from the student perspective. In particular, we are interested in investigating how students develop expert-like perceptions of computation as a practice within the professional physics community. To investigate this aspect of student development, we employ the Communities of Practice framework, which describes how students navigate through a …
Expert problem solvers are characterized by continuous evaluation of their progress towards a solution. One characteristic of expertise is self-diagnosis directed towards elaboration of the solvers' conceptual understanding, knowledge organization or strategic approach. "Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. We have been investigating how introductory physics students perform in such tasks. Developing a robust rubric is essential for objective evaluation of s…
Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Problem solvers may generate diagrams to orient to a scenario, to organize information, to directly extract an answer, or as a tool of communication. In this study, we interviewed 19 undergraduate and graduate physics majors, asking them to solve 18 multiple-choice physics problems -- with no prompting regarding diagrams -- and then six diagramming tasks of situations similar to six of the multiple-choice problems. By comparing spontaneously generated and prompted diagrams, we identify different di…
"Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. The recitation classes in an introductory physics class (~200 students) were split into a control group and three experimental groups in which different levels of guidance was provided for performing the self-diagnosis activities. We have been a) investigating how students in each group performed on subsequent near and far transfer questions given as part of the exams; and b) comparing student's initial scores on their q…
Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Research-validated interactive tutorials that build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have been investigating student difficulties with quantum mechanics pertaining to the double-slit experiment in various situations that appear to be counterintuitive and contradict classical notions of particles and waves. For example, if we send single electrons through the slits, they may behave as a "wave" in part of the experiment and as a "particle" in anothe…
We present a framework for investigating effective dynamics of SU(3) color charge. Two- and three-body effective interaction terms inspired by the Heisenberg spin model are considered. In particular, a toy model for a three-source "baryon" is constructed and investigated analytically and numerically for various choices of interactions. VPython is used to visualize the nontrivial color charge dynamics. The treatment should be accessible to undergraduate students who have taken a first course in quantum mechanics, and suggestions for independent student projects are proposed.
