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Informal physics programs can play a vital role in supporting student learning and sense of community beyond the formal settings of a classroom or laboratory. This work builds on a recent study of the impact of facilitating informal physics programs on students&#39; physics identity, sense of belonging, and career skills development by narrowing the focus to specifically examine effects on female students who are underrepresented in physics. We found a significant shift in confidence of choice of major when compared prior to and after facilitating informal physics programs. All female students who were interviewed discussed a positive effect of participating in informal programs on their interest and motivation with regards to the field of physics and the development of characteristics indicative of a growth mindset.

PERC SM 21

Impact of informal physics programs on female university students

female students

informal physics programs

physics identity

inclusion

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AAPT SM 21

Informal physics programs can play a vital role in supporting student learning and sense of community beyond the formal settings of a classroom or laboratory. This work builds on a recent study of the impact of facilitating informal physics programs on students' physics identity, sense of belonging, and career skills development by narrowing the focus to specifically examine effects on female students who are underrepresented in physics. We found a significant shift in confidence of choice of major when compared prior to and after facilitating informal physics programs. All female students who were interviewed discussed a positive effect of participating in informal programs on their interest and motivation with regards to the field of physics and the development of characteristics indicative of a growth mindset.

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**Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics**

As a gateway discipline to STEM majors and careers, physics plays a central role in deciding who does, and who doesn't, get to discover and pursue scientific careers. Technical and scientific professionals are rewarded with economic privilege and status which affords them both social and cultural power. Therefore, social justice will be realized only when the opportunity, and the choice, to excel in physics is open to all students. The culture and practices of the physics classroom reflect the culture of physics at large, which raises the question of how our professional physics communities can embrace, rather than inadvertently repel, a diverse group of academics that can help improve physics culture.  To this end, the 2021 Physics Education Research Conference will focus on defining inclusive spaces and practices. Additionally, we will explore strategies for eliminating exclusionary practices in our classrooms, research spaces, and professional organizations. We call on the community to propose sessions that will drive conversations related to these initiatives throughout PERC 2021.

Please download the full program [here. ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRMC_SYJ3PUqXyP7sskA7LRSA8ow0eRE/view?usp=sharing)

August 4, 2021 - August 5, 2021 in a Virtual Conference Format

Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics

Scientists are often encouraged to engage in some form of ethical training. With cases of scientific misconduct being reported, we are looking for ways to improve these training sessions. In this study we investigate how scientists engage in Epistemic Games, and if identifying these games can provide some insight into how scientists engage in ethical discussions. This was done through the lens of a fellowship we formed of fifteen faculty at one university. This fellowship met for numerous sessions in the span of a year to discuss topics in the sciences including reproducibility and integrity in data. These sessions were transcribed and organized into Epistemic Games using three characteristics: the target epistemic form, the entry and exit conditions, and the moves made by the participants. Using these games, we can begin to understand the different factors that influence a group discussion towards a particular goal. With this knowledge, we can then begin to understand if there are situations that prompt someone to invoke more ethical values, and whether this knowledge can be used to improve ethical training.

Identifying epistemic games in faculty discussions about values in science

Significant focus in the PER community has been paid to student reasoning in undergraduate quantum mechanics. However, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted 15 exploratory think-aloud interviews with students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university cross-listed in the physics and computer science departments. Focusing on responses to one particular problem, we identify two notably consistent problem-solving strategies across students in the context of a particular interview prompt, which we term Naive Measurement Probabilities (NMP) and Virtual Quantum Computer (VQC), respectively. Operating from a resources framework, we interpret these strategies as choices of coherent (and potentially mutually-generative)sets of resources to employ and available actions to perform.

Investigating students’ strategies for interpreting quantum states in an upper-division quantum computing course

With the integration of computation into physics courses becoming more prevalent to adequately prepare our graduates for the workforce, there is a need for instructional and assessment materials for computational practices. In introductory physics courses, computation is typically used to model motion and so while loops are one of the first components of programs that students encounter. Our study examines and compares students' conception of the while loop following the completion of three computational problems and their engagement with the while loop in a new computational problem. We present three student cases who have similar conceptions of the while loop with aspects including its update function and the connection of lines of code in the while loop, specifically in how force, position, and momentum depend on each other. Despite their similar conception of the while loop, there is a variation in the outcomes of their engagement with the while loop in a new computational problem.

Comparing student conceptions and construction of while loops in modeling motion

Students in a spins-first course often have difficulties transitioning from discrete to continuous quantum systems. We believe that computation may naturally support the transition because continuous structures like wavefunctions are necessarily discretized in order to be used in operations like numerical integration. We remotely interviewed six students who were concurrently enrolled in a junior-level introductory spins-first quantum mechanics course and a computational lab course, which were designed to synergize with each other. During the interview, participants organized a set of 20 cards that contained a variety of quantum mechanics concepts and representations, including snippets of Python code. Using a phenomenographic approach, this poster will discuss the various ways that participants made sense of the cards and how they organized the cards into groups such as “discrete” and “continuous”.

How Students Organize Quantum Concepts and Representations: A Card Sorting Task

Inquiry-based physics labs often include a focus on collecting and analyzing scientific data. During the process of making sense of the data, students often engage in data cleaning, even if not explicitly instructed to. Data cleaning is the process of identifying and mitigating instances in the data that are misaligned with expectations or hypotheses of the experiment, often due to equipment or software bugs. Our research analyzes think-aloud interviews from thirteen students and observational data in a first-semester, undergraduate IPLS lab. Qualitative coding focused on students’ decision-making processes while engaging in data cleaning in a think-aloud interview setting and in observation data of students working in the lab. Results show that students typically follow a process of noticing an anomaly, reasoning about its cause, and then either keeping or discarding the anomaly. However, nuances in this pattern differed in the lab environment as teaching and learning assistants had a significant impact on students’ methods of data cleaning. Although determining the source of outliers in data is complicated, unpacking students’ decision-making process is important for lab instructors to better support students in learning how to work with and interpret data.

Investigating Students' Process of Data Cleaning

The concept of infinity is applied widely in various contexts in physics, particularly while implementing the limits of large quantities, such as distance, time, and mass. We are investigating how students deal with this concept when they solve problems in mathematics and physics. We report results from individual semi-structured interviews with physics students, where they are required to use the concept of infinity to solve the problems. We found that students have several difficulties with the implementation and interpretation of the concept of infinity. These difficulties are due to either insufficient understanding of the underlying mathematical concept, differences in how it is interpreted and implemented in mathematics and physics, or inappropriate implementation to physics. We also found that student difficulties stem from the fact that in mathematics infinity is used as an abstract upper bound, whereas in physics it is used to quantify scales of physical quantities.

Student understanding and applications of infinity in physics and mathematics

PhysPort (www.physport.org) is a website that supports physics instructors in incorporating research-based teaching practices in their classrooms. The PhysPort Data Explorer is an online tool for physics instructors to analyze their research-based assessment data (including FCI, FMCE, BEMA, CSEM, CLASS, MPEX, and many more). Instructors upload their students' responses using our secure interface. The Data Explorer matches their pre/post data, scores it, compares it to national data, and graphs it in an interactive and intuitive manner. Instructors can look at their results over time, break their results down by question or cluster, and make comparisons between courses. Instructors can also upload data related to student demographics, academic record or background, and look at their assessment results based on this information. We present the Data Explorer and discuss equity issues around analysis and interpretation of research-based assessment results, in order to support faculty in using data to reveal and address inequities, to more effectively support minoritized groups of students, and to minimize and eliminate harm.

Using the PhysPort Data Explorer to analyze research-based assessment results

In this study of a large enrollment introductory physics course, I investigated students' use of free online resources (YouTube, Khan Academy, Chegg) and newly-implemented class resources since the Covid-19 transition to remote learning. In my mixed-methods approach, I surveyed and interviewed students on their perceptions and use of expanded course resources which include: pre-lecture module with introductory videos, quizzes with instructional feedback, tutorial assignment with low-stakes grading parameters, and demonstration videos. Students also engage with weekly activities similar to pre-Covid-19 but adapted to the remote setting, including synchronous remote lectures and active-learning recitations, asynchronous recitation quizzes as exam-like practice, and online homework assignments. The survey data suggest students value the expanded course resources as helpful to their learning, and report little use of solutions sites like Chegg. Despite increased accessibility of virtual meetings, students still do not engage frequently with course office hours or the University Learning Centers.

Addressing Barriers in Introductory Physics: Multiple Modes of Engagement and Feedback

During the crises of spring 2020 - the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, the associated economic crisis, and civil uprising due to racialized violence against Black people - many students continued their education despite numerous challenges. Work went into understanding the limitations of remote instruction to better ensure students' success; and instructors adapted instruction and transformed courses to mitigate the impact of these challenges on student engagement and performance. Much of this work centered access inequities. Access inequity occurs when individual students are not able to engage with remote instruction due to conditions that prevent them from receiving instruction, such as lack of material resources, such as adequate computers and access to reliable internet connection, that are essential to remote instruction or poorly accessible educational materials for students with disabilities. However, environmental inequity, situations where a student may be able to access remote instruction materials but circumstances prevent the student from engaging in the ways that other students can-is less well documented. In these situations, students have access but may not be able to devote attention, engage in discussions, turn on video conferencing, or interact as other students might. In this work, we focus on environmental inequity. Additionally, the voices of students as learners and also members of the educational community were neglected in many efforts to transform education to meet the challenging circumstances of the pandemic. For example, Author 3 indicated that faculty were not listening to students and were in many ways exacerbating the challenges that students were facing during the hardships of the global pandemic. That proclamation was the motivation for this study, which examines the experiences of Learning Assistants as students and instructional peer support, with respect to teaching and learning during a year of overlapping crises.

A Student-Centered Understanding of the Impacts of Environmental Inequities on Teaching and Learning during Remote Instruction

This study investigated gender differences in perceived recognition as a physicist and its relation to physics identity. We surveyed 688 students (228 women, 460 men) at a research-intensive university in [country redacted for review] at both the junior and senior undergraduate levels with items measuring perceived recognition and physics identity. Similar to other studies, we find that female physics students report lower recognition as a physicist from their instructors, families and friends compared to male students. In contrast, there were no gender differences in students’ perceptions of friends asking them for their advice/input in physics related problems. Perceived recognition from instructors was lower than recognition from family and friends for both male and female students. We find that both perceived recognition from instructors and physics identity are significantly lower at the senior compared with the junior levels. Multiple linear regressions for male and female students individually found that both perceived recognition from instructors and from family/friends predicted students’ physics identity. However, the perception that their friends sought their advice on physics-related problems predicted physics identity only for female students, not for male students. These results may indicate a shift in students’ understanding of what it means to be a physicist as they progress through the degree program, and that female students may have a wider range of sources feeding into their physics identity formation. The results point to further research being needed to understand better the mechanism by which students form perceptions of instructors seeing them as physics people.

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