United States

This poster will present a portion of a mixed methods research study designed to investigate how students&#39; self-efficacy (SE), or one&#39;s confidence in their abilities to complete a task, varies from moment to moment. Our quantitative methods utilized the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), which pings participants semi-randomly several times a day to answer surveys. The survey items were designed to measure the in-the-moment, domain-specific SE of undergraduate science majors. To identify the task the participant is doing at that moment, one of the open-ended survey questions asked students &quot;What is the main thing you are doing?&quot; The data from this question are being used to generate a dictionary of responses which will then be used to categorize tasks. This categorization will be used to create a new survey item including a dropdown list of responses which will be utilized in future studies.

PERC SM 22

Creating a Dictionary of Task Responses from an ESM Survey

PERC 2022 is focused on "queering physics education" through an intersectional lens. By "queering," we are centering queer theory which breaks down social constructions and hierarchies to unpack normalized assumptions. In the context of physics education, we want to apply the theory to unpack who has power in physics to control the production of future physicists, how physics policies and practices are sometimes built on ideas of punishment and power, and how PER embeds binaries in both its content and sociological research. Further, we want to encourage a dialogue that is both a critique and an imagining of a queer future for PER.

Explicit attention will be given to constructions of race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality and how they interact and impact lived experiences.

We have had such a fun time organizing this year’s PERC. You might be aware that we were committed to transparency and documenting our processes and decision making which we outlined here. This year has also been challenging to be a queer or otherwise marginalized person in the US. And we continue to seek and provide support for those individuals.

As such, we recommend that folks visiting Grand Rapids who have the means consider giving to some local organizations who are working to advocate for those impacted by historic and ongoing marginalization and violence.


PERC 2022 focused on "queering physics education" through an intersectional lens. By "queering," we centered queer theory which breaks down social constructions and hierarchies to unpack normalized assumptions. In the context of physics education, we apply the theory to unpack who has power in physics to control the production of future physicists, how physics policies and practices are sometimes built on ideas of punishment and power, and how PER embeds binaries in both its content and sociological research. Further, we wanted to encourage a dialogue that is both a critique and an imagining of a queer future for PER. Explicit attention was given to constructions of race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality and how they interact and impact lived experiences.

This poster will present a portion of a mixed methods research study designed to investigate how students' self-efficacy (SE), or one's confidence in their abilities to complete a task, varies from moment to moment. Our quantitative methods utilized the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), which pings participants semi-randomly several times a day to answer surveys. The survey items were designed to measure the in-the-moment, domain-specific SE of undergraduate science majors. To identify the task the participant is doing at that moment, one of the open-ended survey questions asked students "What is the main thing you are doing?" The data from this question are being used to generate a dictionary of responses which will then be used to categorize tasks. This categorization will be used to create a new survey item including a dropdown list of responses which will be utilized in future studies.

poster

Quantitative and survey research often limit or erase the possibilities of trans people within datasets. Gender is often measured as a binary and is also conflated with sex in survey research. Through a critical queer lens, we will discuss new approaches for measuring gender which could allow for a more nuanced understanding of how gender shapes our experiences. Using data collected from the Trans* Inclusivity Scale, developed through my dissertation, I will talk about trans* inclusive behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge student affairs staff have when working alongside trans* students and how this can extend into other areas of education and research. The discussion will then point to areas where policies and practices can be utilized to create a better environment for trans students And, finally, the talk will conclude with a discussion of future research within this work.

Beyond the Binary: Critically Queer Approaches to Quantitative Research in Education

Though much of contemporary PER work is carried out within the US, there are PER efforts outside the US that are frequently overlooked by the broader US PER community. The result is often not only a blinkered representation of the scholarship on the teaching and learning of physics, but also a lack of cross-cultural comparison between international contexts that may have important implications for physics education researchers and physics teachers interpreting and applying the results of PER studies from other countries. What is needed is a greater awareness of the international work done in the field of PER as well as an appreciation of the factors that can substantively shape the teaching and learning of physics in those international contexts. In this session we showcase the work of PER scholars working in the Nordic countries and discuss the Nordic context as it relates to PER. This session brings together a collection of physics education researchers working within Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, all of whom are members of newly established Nordic Physics Education Research Consortium. The presenters will each introduce the broader efforts of the research groups in which they work, discuss their own research, and reflect on some of the contextual factors that make PER different for them outside the US. The session will also provide time for discussion with the audience and briefly introduce the goals of the Nordic Physics Education Research Consortium.

Physics education research in the Nordic Countries

This session features three early career scholars whose work centers queerness and queer theory in the context of STEM higher education.

Queerness in STEM education: perspectives from early career scholars

Symmetry is widely used by physicists and recognized as valuable in the Next Generation Science Standards, which embeds symmetry in two of the Cross-Cutting Concepts: Patterns; and Scale, proportion, and quantity. Using the theoretical framework of Knowledge in Pieces, KiP, we hypothesize that students have symmetry resources that they use in sensemaking about magnetism. In this qualitative study, we recorded videos of middle and high school grade students as they interacted with magnets and created models of permanent magnetism in various informal learning settings . During the interviews, we asked questions intended to trigger the use of symmetry resources.  We transcribed and analyzed the interview data using an approach to discourse analysis informed by KiP. The preliminary results suggest that students have knowledge resources that they are able to access for the types of symmetry present in permanent magnetism: translational, rotational, reflective, scaling, and pseudo-vector symmetries.

Students’ use of symmetry resources when sensemaking about magnetism

This research analyzes the effectiveness of two massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by Georgetown University via edX, Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Quantum Mechanics for Everyone (QME). The QM course was designed for undergraduate physics majors and teaches quantum mechanics using operators in a representation-independent formalism. QME was created for those without a physics background and focuses primarily on conceptual understanding.
Here, we focus on student responses to an open-ended question within both courses that targets students' understanding of "quantum seeing in the dark" (interaction-free measurements) in the context of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. We present our preliminary findings around students' conceptions of how atoms interact with the analyzers, paying particular attention to their scientific language fluency when presenting their ideas. We also present a comparison of student responses between the two courses and discuss the impact of increased formalism on student conceptions.

Investigating students’ fluency with quantum ideas in the context of interaction-free experiments

Evaluation of students is central to mainstream US society's approach to formal education. In physics classrooms, grading is typically the primary context for evaluation. Grading can serve to rank students, gatekeep, and influence students' careers and livelihoods, all in inequitable ways. It can also serve as a channel for formative feedback. Relatively recently, some educators have been turning a critical gaze towards grading and evaluative practices overall. One collection of ideas that has emerged falls under the umbrella of ungrading, the practice of de-emphasizing or removing grades as a motivating factor in formal education settings. Here I show preliminary results from a completely ungraded introductory mechanics course with 84 students. Ungrading in that course centered on self-reflection and qualitative feedback, with students assigning themselves a final grade at the end of the course. Data include FCI scores, qualitative student feedback, and other metrics.

Preliminary results from ungrading in intro physics classes

Over the past couple decades, computational thinking has emerged as an important problem-solving strategy for physics students to possess. However, an understanding of how students engage in computational thinking has remained somewhat elusive. Our study focuses on student think-aloud interviews involving two different computational tasks – one where students are asked to talk through an already built and working program and one where they have to edit and add to a given minimally working code to model a given situation. Applying a computational thinking framework that identifies fourteen different computational practices, we analyzed the interviews of four different students in an introductory physics course.

Here, we present the type and frequency of practices students engaged in and we compare across students and tasks. We will discuss the application of the framework and the impact of task design on elicited practices.

Case studies of computational thinking practices displayed by introductory physics students

Working in groups is often an essential part of courses with an emphasis on engaging in the practices of physics. While how students work together has been studied in the context of introductory physics laboratories and tutorials, it is under-studied in upper division physics courses. Here, we present case studies from a group project-based computational physics class, drawing on self-assessments in which students evaluated both themselves and their peers, as well as video data of students working in groups. We find that how students see themselves within groups and the types of intellectual contributions they make to work shift over time. Understanding these students' experiences can provide the foundation for future research in group dynamics in upper division, computational, and project-based physics courses.

Navigating group work in computational projects:Case studies using self-assessments

Engaging in the scientific process through laboratory experiments is a significant component of learning physics.   The Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) laboratories at the University of Utah are facilitated by a team of teaching assistants (TAs) and learning assistants (LAs), who are responsible for providing resources and support for the students to perform the experiments that they design.  The frequency of interactions between students and TAs/LAs has important effects on the engagement of students in the lab and performance on lab tests (Stang and Roll, 2014).  We use a qualitative research study to explore how TAs/LAs interact with students to support laboratory engagement, and the varied amount of interactions that TAs/LAs have with students.  Several sections of the laboratory were recorded and moments where students interacted with TAs/LAs were analyzed to describe how student-TA/LA interactions facilitate engagement with science.

Investigating Interactions Between Students and TAs/LAs in a Reform-Based Introductory Physics Laboratory

In an earlier study we showed that small amounts of extra credit offered for early progress on online homework assignments can reduce cramming behavior in introductory physics students. This work expands on the prior study by implementing a planning prompt intervention inspired by Yeomans and Reich's similar treatment. In the prompt we asked students to what degree they intended to earn extra credit offered for early work on the module sequence, and what their plan was to realize their intentions. The survey was assigned for ordinary course credit and due several days before the first extra credit deadline. We found that students who completed the prompt earned on average 0.6 more extra credit points and completed the modules an average of 1.0 days earlier compared to a previous semester. We detect the impact of the survey by creating a multilinear model based on data from students exposed to the intervention as well as students in a previous semester. Data from five homework sequences are included in the model to account for differences between the two semesters that cannot be attributed to the planning prompt intervention.

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Creating a Dictionary of Task Responses from an ESM Survey

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Beyond the Binary: Critically Queer Approaches to Quantitative Research in Education

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