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PERC SM 20

Students’ Conceptual Understanding and Problem-Solving of the Work-Energy and Impulse-Momentum Theorems

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Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?

Developing coupled, multiple-response assessment items addressing scientific practices

Practicing physicists’ knowledge about disability: Development of the Disability and Physics Careers Survey (DPCS)

Student Ownership of Physics Projects: Manifestation in Student-Project Interactions (PERC)

Physics education research (PER) studies of students understanding of kinematics have largely been focused on difficulties and misconceptions ideas that act as barriers to student understanding of formal physics. Our research takes an alternative perspective on students ideas. We offer insight into student resources for understanding kinematics ideas students have that we consider to be the beginnings of a more sophisticated scientific understanding of motion. Our analysis of 582 written student responses to several kinematics questions highlights four common resources students use when justifying their solutions to different problems. In this paper, we elaborate on these four resources and give examples from our preliminary research.

Identifying student resources for understanding kinematics (PERC)

Physics problems can be difficult for students, even after adequate instruction. Recent studies have indicated that reflexive reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to conceptual knowledge may be responsible for these difficulties. Attending to these reflexive processes during instruction may improve performance on difficult physics questions. We have therefore devised a training that aims to utilize reflexive processing to influence performance on difficult physics questions. Our findings have implications for improving physics instruction generally.

Investigating the Impact of Cognitive Training on Newton’s 2nd Law

Much work has been done to characterize the reasoning of students as they solve mathematics-intensive problems. In this work, we characterize the problem-solving strategies in a classroom setting of advanced novices: students who have completed an introductory physics course but are far from expert-like 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 make predictions about how a system will behave. Our results show that there is a need to recognize and teach these intermediary strategies to enable more novice students to check their answers. The teaching of more advanced strategies like limit checking will require careful scaffolding, as students generally do not succeed when simply told to check limits.

Characterizing the mathematical problem-solving strategies of advanced novice physics students

One argument for keeping the physics GRE is that it can help applicants who might otherwise be missed in the admissions process stand out. In this work, we evaluate whether this claim is supported by physics graduate school admissions decisions. We used admissions data from five PhD-granting physics departments over a 2-year period to see how the fraction of applicants admitted varied based on their physics GRE scores. We compared applicants with low GPAs to applicants with higher GPAs and applicants from large undergraduate universities to applicants from smaller undergraduate universities. We find that for applicants who might otherwise have been missed (e.g. have a low GPA or attended a small school) having a high physics GRE score did not seem to increase the applicants chances of being admitted to the schools. However, having a low physics GRE score seemed to penalize otherwise competitive applicants.

The Physics GRE does not help overlooked applicants

We explore how students visual gaze changes as they tackle sequential and simultaneous synthesis problems. Sequential problems involve multiple events that occur chronologically, and simultaneous problems involve events that occur concurrently. Using eye tracker, we recorded students eye movements when they handled the tasks and verbalized their problem-solving strategies. These students (N = 22) were from an introductory calculus-based physics course. Results indicate that students made more gaze transitions between problem statement and diagram in simultaneous tasks than in sequential ones. However, they made more gaze transitions between different elements of the diagram in sequential tasks than in simultaneous ones. Further, for the sequential tasks, most students identified two concepts (regardless of correctness) but often invoked only one concept for simultaneous tasks. The results indicate that students tended to divide sequential problems into segments of smaller tasks but treated simultaneous problems as a single-step task.

Students' visual gaze in solving sequential and simultaneous synthesis problems

Research-based instructional strategies in physics promote active participation in collaborative activities as a primary means for students to construct understanding. This emphasis is in line with situated learning theory, in which learning is indicated by a students increasing centrality in a community. In both perspectives, to learn more is to engage more centrally: to start discussions, conduct experiments, write on the board, decide when a question has been answered, and so on. In a study of small-group collaborative learning activities in introductory physics classrooms at four different universities, we observe that as students engage with one another and with instructors, they are not only negotiating physics concepts, but also negotiating social positioning. Some students are centered (and their contributions are valued), while others are marginalized (and their contributions are neglected). The aim of this research is to become conscious of how centering and marginalization shape the way physics is taught and learned.

Centering and marginalization in introductory university physics courses

In order to make physics more diverse and inclusive, it is important to recognize and understand factors preventing students from pursuing physics. The effect of spiritual goals and religiousness on physics career choice is an understudied area in the physics education community, despite there being known historic tensions between religion and science in the West (e.g. the Inquisition of Galileo). Drawing on publicly accessible national survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), we examine the effect of spiritual/religious goals on choosing a physics major for US freshmen college students. Our study shows that students who identify themselves as more spiritual/religious are significantly less likely to choose physics as their majors. In addition, we examine how the effect of spirituality/religiousness is different for students from underrepresented groups such as women, African American/Black students, and Hispanic students.

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Developing coupled, multiple-response assessment items addressing scientific practices

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