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Group work provides valuable opportunities for students to actively participate in classroom conversations. Instructors often emphasize generating and sharing ideas in group work, but how these ideas are shared in small-group discussions can be complicated by social dynamics within that group. In this project, we applied techniques from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyze the interpersonal meanings in students discourse in a college physics lab section. By examining how students socially positioned themselves in the episode, we found that students steered the groups conversation not only by explicitly offering ideas, but also by positioning as not-knowing, raising questions, and appealing to authority. This episode provides another example to a growing body of research describing the consequential role of social dynamics in how physics students contribute to small-group discussions.

PERC SM 20

Examining the Social Dynamics of Small-Group Discussions (PERC)

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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?

[course name] is a flipped, problem-based learning course for introductory, calculus-based mechanics. [course name] was designed using the communities of practice framework, with a principle learning goal to develop scientific practices. To promote students' development of practices, students spend their in-class time working in groups of 4 to 5 members to solve complex physics problems. Scientific practice development is then facilitated through formative feedback and assessments aligned with the growth in these practice. Each student receives weekly, individualized feedback from their instructor (either a faculty member, teaching assistant or learning assistant) as a practice-based assessment. The feedback focuses on helping students improve their individual understanding and group collaboration through the development of key group-based practices such as decision making and planning. This paper reports on a series of semi-structured interviews that were conducted with students at various points in the semester to understand the impact feedback had on them.

Student perspective about the impacts of feedback

Although we have found that students in our Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course describe physics as more relevant to their primary interests than do their counterparts in a traditional introductory physics environment, we do not yet know whether IPLS courses better prepare life science students to use physical reasoning in contexts that extend beyond those explicitly encountered in IPLS. To answer this question of whether IPLS better prepared our students for future learning, we designed and administered a task related to fluid dynamics at the conclusion of both traditional and IPLS introductory physics courses. We describe the construction of the task and the ways in which IPLS students approached the task differently than did students in the traditional course. We interpret the results in light of the goal of the IPLS course, supporting transfer within the preparation for future learning paradigm around which our course is designed.

Assessing the impact of IPLS on physical reasoning

This study was conducted in a Modeling Instruction Introductory Physics I course and investigates whether students social interdependence is associated to semester-long conceptual and physics identity gains. In Modeling Instruction, students spend the majority of class time working in small groups leading to varying levels of task and outcome interdependence with other group members. Detailed data were collected to measure pre- to post- conceptual learning and identity gains as well as reported task and outcome interdependence for each student. Students pre-semester individualism and cooperation beliefs were also collected as these measures have been shown to be correlated with social interdependence. Linear regressions were conducted to understand associations between interdependence measures and pre-to-post semester differences in students conceptual and physics identity measures; notably, students who reported greater levels of initiated task interdependence also had more positive improvements in their beliefs in being recognized as a physics person. A significant positive shift in students pre-to-post semester cooperation beliefs was also observed.

The Associations between Conceptual Learning, Physics Identity and Social Interdependence

The national preschool curriculum in Mexico considers 80 hours for learning science during the school year. Early child science education is essential for developing skills and positive attitudes toward science. However, for the instruction to be successful, teachers must have adequate knowledge of science and science didactic. In the case of Mexico, preschool science curriculum and teacher preparation are insufficient. There are few professional development courses for in-service and pre-service teachers, and the material and textbooks for this educational level is limited. The Department of Physics Education of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico had different projects that involve the design of curriculum, experiment manuals, evaluation tools, postgrad thesis, and teacher professional development workshops. This work presents the results and analysis of the evolution of these projects and their influence in classrooms.

Research Projects in Science Education for Preschool, Evolution, and Results in Curriculum Development, Evaluation Tools, and Teacher Workshops.

Nationally, about 80\% of two-year college (TYC) students intend to obtain a bachelor`s degree; however, only 13\% successfully do so. Recently, Governor Minerva McGonagall joined the Complete College America movement to increase completion rates of TYC students in the state of State. Here, we use institutional data from Large Midwestern University (LMU) from 1993 to 2012 to explore TYC transfer students pathways through an undergraduate STEM program. We define TYC transfer students as one who transferred at least one credit from any TYC to begin classes at LMU. Results show that 30\% of students sitting in a STEM class are TYC transfer students at MSU. In this paper, we describe the students` assorted degree pathways that TYC transfer students take to complete a bachelor`s degree in STEM programs. We will also investigate how these pathways change for different race/ethnicity markers.

An Investigation of Degree Pathways for Students of Color with Transfer Credits

Recent work by Kanim and Cid [1] suggests that the data used in PER is not representative of students enrolled in physics courses at the national level. Using university-level demographics, Kanim and Cid showed that PER studies oversample from white, wealthy, mathematically-prepared populations of students. What we do not yet know is whether these university-level demographics are representative of introductory physics courses, which are a primary site of research in PER. In this paper we present data from six US institutions, comparing the composition of introductory physics classes to aggregate university demographics in terms of gender and race and/or ethnicity. Our aim is to make progress in characterizing the demographics of introductory physics courses, which is imperative to deepening our understanding of how social disparity is manifested in physics classrooms and the institutions that host them. We discuss limitations of our approach, including problematizing the use of statistics to make sense of who is enrolling in introductory physics.

Toward Characterizing the Demographics of Introductory Physics Courses (PERC)

We use the theory of community of practice to describe engagement in authentic practices in the context of an online discussion board of high school physics teachers. The class, associated with a new Master program in physics with teaching emphasis requires students to participate in weekly problem-solving and biweekly reading reflection discussion boards. We take a social network analysis approach to investigate how members of an online teacher community interact with each other through a nine-week classical mechanics summer course. We found that the participation of students in the problem-solving discussions fluctuates from week to week; a result of the structural features of the course. Comparatively, the reading reflection participation did not show a noticeable variation. In order to gain more insight into our findings, and reveal the course's structural features, we characterized posts by looking for emergent themes Participation in an Online Community of High School Physics Teachers

Participation in an Online Community of High School Physics Teachers

The curriculum-focused [actual name masked for this review] faculty online learning community was established to provide extended support to faculty implementing a student-centered physics and physical science curriculum. Through regular, facilitator-led, online meetings of small groups, faculty raise and discuss issues of teaching and learning pertinent to the curriculum. In this paper we introduce the Flow of Conversation tool, developed to identify meeting prompts from both facilitators and non-facilitators that initiate discussion about issues of teaching and learning. We showcase the application of this tool to a community meeting taking place after the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated transition to online instruction. In this particular meeting, the tool allowed us to perceive the shared agency between facilitators and non-facilitators in raising and responding to consequential issues of teaching and learning. We suggest this tool may be appropriate for investigating facilitated meetings in other professional communities, where members are positioned to contribute meaningfully towards the progression of knowledge.

A tool for documenting and analyzing the flow of conversation about teaching and learning in facilitated faculty conversations

Interviews with high school students in a city in Europe suggest that student naïve ideas about radioactivity can shift fluidly from one context to another. We encourage instructors to consider this context-sensitivity when helping students learn about radioactivity. An example of instruction that has such consideration built into it is Yamamotos The Radiation Around Us, an instructional unit in HypothesisExperiment Class (HEC), the educational approach proposed by Itakura. HEC expects that individual students may simultaneously have multiple ways of thinking about a given situation, and several measures are put in place to support students in drawing on these various views. We will discuss how the Radiation Around Us respects and encourages simultaneous ideas from students (and hence fluidity of student reasoning). We will also present data from high school students suggesting that the intention of the curriculum to foster fluidity in student reasoning actually has an effect on students.

Respecting fluidity of student ideas: student-centered and enjoyable lessons about radioactivity

This project aims to create and evaluate an environment where students of different backgrounds can collaborate in physics public engagement work in order to foster communication skills and develop intersecting identities. In collaboration with Science Gallery Detroit, a team of four undergraduate students, two physics and two design, are working together to create an online platform for public engagement in physics. This team is aiming to create a visually appealing website that allows users to engage with different physics topics. The students choose their favorite topics and a narrative that connects the concepts through everyday life phenomena. In this poster, we present the work in progress platform as well as the research aspect. We use interviews, audio recordings, and weekly reflections to understand how the students develop or expand their physics identities and how the project evolves as the students' understanding of both physics and art evolves.

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