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Psychological threat, defined as a person&#39;s perception that the demands being experienced exceed that person&#39;s resources to meet those demands, can affect cognition and behavior, and may be associated with negative outcomes in certain motivated performance contexts. To understand how psychological threat may manifest in the context of introductory physics courses, we examine students&#39; psychological threat across time and in relation to specific course-related activities and experiences.  Students in an introductory physics class were given surveys at four time points throughout the semester to measure their level of overall psychological threat, and perceptions about the relative demand posed by specific course experiences.  We report on students&#39; perceptions of the demands of the course, their psychological threat level, and how these perceptions change throughout time. Our results can help inform efforts to identify teaching practices and interventions that may reduce psychological threat and improve student experience in introductory physics courses.

PERC SM 22

Psychological threat and demands in an introductory physics class

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.

Psychological threat, defined as a person's perception that the demands being experienced exceed that person's resources to meet those demands, can affect cognition and behavior, and may be associated with negative outcomes in certain motivated performance contexts. To understand how psychological threat may manifest in the context of introductory physics courses, we examine students' psychological threat across time and in relation to specific course-related activities and experiences.  Students in an introductory physics class were given surveys at four time points throughout the semester to measure their level of overall psychological threat, and perceptions about the relative demand posed by specific course experiences.  We report on students' perceptions of the demands of the course, their psychological threat level, and how these perceptions change throughout time. Our results can help inform efforts to identify teaching practices and interventions that may reduce psychological threat and improve student experience in introductory physics courses.

poster

This work is part of a multi-institution collaboration developing a fair, valid, and reliable research-based conceptual fluids assessment, the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE).  The FCE will utilize two-tier multiple-choice items covering both fluids statics and fluids dynamics.  Rasch analysis will be used to create different equivalent versions of the FCE, allowing instructors to give just the statics questions, just the dynamics questions, or a combination of both.  In this poster we will describe the development of student-based distractors for the FCE.  IPLS instructors interested in serving as a pilot test site should contact Project Lead Dawn Meredith.

Development of student-based distractors for the Fluids Conceptual Evaluation (FCE)

The Big Astronomy Project released a planetarium show during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in a planetarium show that was streamed as a 360-degree YouTube stream and then shown in-person at planetariums after. This provides an opportunity to compare and contrast various aspects of learning across two modalities. One such aspect we can study is the social aspects of learning between the two. Using frameworks such as the contextual model of learning and the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) we explore through audience interviews and survey responses how social norms and expectations are different and how that impacts audience engagement. Areas of focus include expectations of how much people should or should not talk during a show, who people watch and discuss the show with afterward, and an analysis of the live chat function of a YouTube stream.

Exploring the different social learning environments of online and in-person planetarium shows

Through this Poster, we will discuss the trajectories of undergraduate physics transfer students into a bachelor's granting university.

Students in the study attend a large, public bachelor's granting university in which a significant fraction of undergraduate physics majors are transfer students.

In one-on-one interviews, students discussed their academic and personal experiences before, during, and after their transition from community college(s) to a bachelor's granting university. During the interviews, we adapted the life grid methodology to track student's career and skill development over time.

In this poster, we will discuss how their career and skill development evolves through their higher education path. We then consider how these paths complicate common narratives about the time students spend in community college and bachelor's granting university.

Research on the Trajectories Transfer Studentstake to Reach a Bachelors Granting University

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.

Creating a Dictionary of Task Responses from an ESM Survey

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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Psychological threat and demands in an introductory physics class

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