We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student's difficulties were epistemological in nature. Our primary goal is to show instructors and curriculum developers that a student's epistemological stance - her ideas about knowledge and learning - can have a direct, causal influence on her learning of physics. This influence exists even when research-based curriculum materials provide implicit epistemological support. For this reason, curriculum materials and teaching techniques could become more effective by explicitly attending to students' epistemologies.
Recently, there has been increased attention to improving laboratory instruction at all levels. At the introductory level, research results have shown differing levels of success based on the nature of the desired learning outcomes. In response to these findings, the University of Colorado's introductory physics lab course was transformed to improve students' development of experimental skills and experimental physics epistemology. We describe the details of the transformation process and initial self-reported learning gains from the first implementation of the transformed course.
The lack of diversity and the under-performance of underrepresented students in STEM courses have been the focus of researchers in the last decade. In particular, many hypotheses have been put forth for the reasons for the under-representation and under-performance of women in physics. Here, we present a framework for helping all students learn in science courses that takes into account four factors: 1) characteristics of instruction and learning tools, 2) implementation of instruction and learning tools, 3) student characteristics, and 4) students' environments. While there has been much rese…
A recent paper by Salehi et al. claims that the differences found between major demographic groups on scores in introductory college physics tests are due to differences in pre-college preparation. No evidence is produced, however, to show that preparation differences are more causally important than any other differences. In one case, the male/female difference, the paper actually provides evidence that preparation gaps are unimportant.
We present the impact on student self-efficacy of an introductory physics for life-science students course taught using a Team-Based Learning pedagogy. We measured self-efficacy using the validated quantitative Sources of Self-Efficacy in Science Courses - Physics, SOSESC-P, survey developed by Fencl and Scheel. Data were collected both at the beginning and end of the semester to evaluate the impact of shifts in individual self-efficacy. After describing the key features of the pedagogy, we find that the Team-Based Learning system at University of Massachusetts Amherst, results in significant …
A goal of Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) curricula is to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and medical settings. To assess whether this goal is being met, we conducted a longitudinal study of the impact of IPLS on student work in later biology and chemistry courses. We report here on one part of that study, a comparison of written responses by students with different physics backgrounds on a diffusion task administered in a senior biology capstone course. We observed differences in student reasoning that were associated …
Laboratory courses are key components of most undergraduate physics programs. Lab courses often aim to achieve the following learning outcomes: developing students' experimental skills, engaging students in authentic scientific practices, reinforcing concepts, and inspiring students' interest and engagement in physics. Some of these outcomes can be measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS), a research-based assessment that measures students' views about experimental physics. We used E-CLASS at the University of Colorado Boulder to measu…
Many prior studies have found a gender gap between male and female students' performance on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students performing better than female students. Prior studies have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group or stereotype threat, e.g., asking test-takers to indicate their ethnicity before taking a test, can lead to deteriorated performance of the stereotyped group. Here, we describe two studies in which we investigated the gender gap on the …
Social distancing due to the Covid-19 pandemic deeply impacted on education worldwide, since schools and universities had to rapidly organise lessons and courses on line. Traditional interactions between teachers and students and, also among students, had to change and was substituted by on line connections. In this context, laboratory work and tutoring, which have an important role in the peer instruction model, needed to be redesigned. Here, we discuss an on line tutoring model adopted for the introductory physics courses at Turin Polytechinc University and evaluate its effectiveness by anal…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. One major focus while helping introductory physics students learn effective problem solving is to help them understand that drawing diagrams can facilitate problem solution. We conducted an investigation in which two different interventions were implemented during recitation quizzes in a large enrollment algebra-based introductory physics course. Students were either (i) asked to solve problems in which the diagrams were drawn for them …
Societal stereotypes and biases pertaining to who belongs in physics and who can excel in physics can impact motivational beliefs, e.g., of women and racial and ethnic minority students in physics courses. This study investigates how the learning environment predicts male and female students' motivational beliefs including physics self-efficacy, interest, and identity at the end of year long (spanning two-semester) algebra-based introductory physics courses. These were courses at a large university in the US taken primarily by biological science majors many of whom are interested in health pro…
There is some evidence that conceptual inquiry-based introductory physics lab curricula, such as RealTime Physics, may improve students' understanding of physics concepts. Thus, these curricula may be attractive for instructors who seek to transform their physics labs to improve student learning. However, the impact of conceptual inquiry-based lab instruction on students' attitudes and beliefs about experimental physics, as measured by the E-CLASS survey, is not yet fully understood. We present data from three curricular approaches over four semesters ($n=701$). We saw no change in E-CLASS sco…
In deciding on a student's grade in a class, an instructor generally needs to combine many individual grading judgments into one overall judgment. Two relatively common numerical scales used to specify individual grades are the 4-point scale (where each whole number 0-4 corresponds to a letter grade) and the percent scale (where letter grades A through D are uniformly distributed in the top 40% of the scale). This paper uses grading data from a single series of courses offered over a period of 10 years to show that the grade distributions emerging from these two grade scales differed in many w…
Several prior studies in introductory physics have found a gender gap on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students performing better than female students. Moreover, prior studies in the context of mathematics have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group can lead to deteriorated performance of the stereotyped group. Here, we describe two studies in which we investigated the impact of interventions on the gender gap on the FCI and CSEM in large introductory physics co…
Research experience and mentoring has been identified as an effective intervention for increasing student engagement and retention in the STEM fields, with high impact on students from undeserved populations. However, one-on-one mentoring is limited by the number of available faculty, and in certain cases also by the availability of funding for stipend. One-on-one mentoring is further limited by the selection and self-selection of students. Since research positions are often competitive, they are often taken by the best-performing students. More importantly, many students who do not see themse…
Introductory Physics Students in Algebra-based Courses Who Typically Worked Alone or in Groups: Insights from Gender-Based Analysis before and during COVID-19
Problem Roulette: Studying Introductory Physics in the Cloud
Problem Roulette（PR）是密歇根大学的一项基于网络的学习服务，它提供了一个大型的物理入门课程考试问题库的主题内随机访问。建立在公共-私有云计算基础设施上，PR在2012年秋季学期为近1000名学生提供了服务，提供了超过60，000个问题页面。这项服务通过提供由当地教授撰写的问题来补充商业出版社的服务。我们描述的服务架构，包括报告和分析能力，并提出了初步评估其使用的影响。在大约500名学习电磁学的学生中，我们发现有229名学生在这学期中解决了50道或更多的问题，他们的成绩比其他学生高出了0.40分（在4.0分的量表上）。这种改善部分反映了一种选择偏见，即更好的学生更频繁地使用该服务。通过使用整体平均成绩（GPA）作为分类器调整这种选择偏差，我们发现普通PR用户的成绩提高了0.22，显著高于0.04的随机噪声水平。简单地说，学生谁工作一个或多个额外的问题，每个工作日赚取近四分之一个字母的平均成绩提高，无论GPA。学生评论强调随机性在帮助他们综合概念方面的重要性。PR源代码在bitbucket存储库中公开。
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 uncerta…
We report on the evolution of the largest physics course at the Technical University Berlin during the COVID-19 pandemic, which boosted the development of online learning content, electronic assessments, and, not at least, the reconceptualization of our teaching methods. By shifting to distance education, we created features that can be easily implemented and combined with any physics-type course at a university level. Thereby, we incidentally made introductory physics sustainably accessible to students having difficulties visiting the university. Besides our experiences gained on blended lear…
While laboratory instruction is a cornerstone of physics education, the impact of student behaviours in labs on retention, persistence in the field, and the formation of students' physics identity remains an open question. In this study, we performed in-lab observations of student actions over two semesters in two pedagogically different sections of the same introductory physics course. We used a cluster analysis to identify different categories of student behaviour and analyzed how they correlate with lab structure and gender. We find that, in lab structures which fostered collaborative group…
Beyond deficit-based models of learners' cognition: Interpreting engineering students' difficulties with sense-making in terms of fine-grained epistemological and conceptual dynamics
The ability to flexibly transform between different representations (e.g., from mathematical to graphical representations) of the same concept is a hallmark of expertise. Prior research suggests that many introductory physics students show lack of representational consistency, e.g., they may construct two representations of the same concept in the same situation that are inconsistent with one another. In this case study, we asked students to construct two representations for the electric field for a situation involving Gauss's law with spherical symmetry (charge conducting sphere surrounded by…
We discuss a study in a first year college introductory physics course for physical science and engineering majors that shows that women, on average, feel less recognized by their physics instructors than men as students who can excel in physics. We also discuss how this lack of perceived positive recognition pertaining to physics can adversely affect their self-efficacy and performance in the course. We recommend that physics instructors not be parsimonious in their praise of students and make a conscious effort to positively recognize their students for their effort and progress whenever an …
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e. their epistemologies. Using data from students completing assessment questions during one-on-one think aloud interviews, we explore how assessment features impact (or did not impact) student engagement with the assessment problems. We analyze video record…
Despite the significant amount of time undergraduate students spend in introductory physics labs, there is little consensus on instructional goals and accepted diagnostic assessments for these labs. In response to these issues, we have developed the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical thinking (PLIC) to assess students' proficiency with critical thinking in a physics lab context. Specifically, the PLIC aims to evaluate students' skills in making sense of data, variability, models, and experimental methods and to assess the effectiveness of lab courses at developing these skills. Here, we discuss…
Perspectives in Quantum Physics: Epistemological, Ontological and Pedagogical. An investigation into student and expert perspectives on the physical interpretation of quantum mechanics, with implications for modern physics instruction
