An uncommon case of relevance through everyday experiences

Physics education research has probed for the relevance of physics in students' everyday lives. Attitudinal and epistemological surveys have asked students if they think of or use physics in their daily lives. We have previously documented how it is uncommon that our life science students describe using or even seeing physics in their daily life (Nair, 2018). This result was unsurprising and aligns with previous scholarship of students majoring in disciplines outside of physics; we have argued that it is optimistic for scholars to expect students with disciplinary homes outside of physics to see their experiences through a lens of physics. Methodologically, we searched for a contrasting case (Sam). Sam is majoring in the life sciences and articulates moments where she uses physics to reason through everyday phenomena. We explore the ways in which courses can support students like Sam to find physics relevant to their everyday experiences.Comment: pre-prin

Leveraging a Relationship with Biology to Expand a Relationship with Physics

This work examines how experiences in one disciplinary domain (biology) can impact the relationship a student builds with another domain (physics). We present a model for disciplinary relationships using the constructs of identity, affect, and epistemology. With these constructs we examine an ethnographic case study of a student who experienced a significant shift in her relationship with physics. We describe how this shift demonstrates (1) a stronger identification with physics, (2) a more mixed affective stance towards physics, and (3) more expert-like ways of knowing in physics. We argue that recruiting the students relationship with biology into experiences of learning physics impacted her relationship with physics as well as her sense of how physics and biology are linked

A Gender Study Investigating Physics Self-Efficacy

The underrepresentation of women in physics has been well documented and a source of concern for both policy makers and educators. My dissertation focuses on understanding the role self-efficacy plays in retaining students, particularly women, in introductory physics. I use an explanatory mixed methods approach to first investigate quantitatively the influence of self-efficacy in predicting success and then to qualitatively explore the development of self-efficacy. In the initial quantitative studies, I explore the utility of self-efficacy in predicting the success of introductory physics students, both women and men. Results indicate that self-efficacy is a significant predictor of success for all students. I then disaggregate the data to examine how self-efficacy develops differently for women and men in the introductory physics course. Results show women rely on different sources of self-efficacy than do men, and that a particular instructional environment, Modeling Instruction, has a positive impact on these sources of self-efficacy. In the qualitative phase of the project, this dissertation focuses on the development of self-efficacy. Using the qualitative tool of microanalysis, I introduce a methodology for understanding how self-efficacy develops moment-by-moment using the lens of self-efficacy opportunities. I then use the characterizations of self-efficacy opportunities to focus on a particular course environment and to identify and describe a mechanism by which Modeling Instruction impacts student self-efficacy. Results indicate that the emphasizing the development and deployment of models affords opportunities to impact self-efficacy. The findings of this dissertation indicate that introducing key elements into the classroom, such as cooperative group work, model development and deployment, and interaction with the instructor, create a mechanism by which instructors can impact the self-efficacy of their students. Results from this study indicate that creating a model to impact the retention rates of women in physics should include attending to self-efficacy and designing activities in the classroom that create self-efficacy opportunities

Exploring Mindset's Applicability to Students' Experiences with Challenge in Transformed College Physics Courses

The mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for learning (Dweck, 2000). However, the mindset literature's applicability to the context of college physics has not been widely studied. In this paper we narrow our focus toward students' descriptions of their responses to challenge in college physics. We ask the research questions, "can we see responses to challenge in college physics that resemble that of the mindset literature?" and "how do students express evidence of challenge and to what extent is such evidence reflective of challenges found in the mindset literature?" To answer these questions, we developed a novel coding scheme for interview dialogue around college physics challenge and students' responses to it. In this paper we present the development process of our coding scheme. We find that it is possible to see student descriptions of challenge that resemble the mindset literature's characterizations. However, college physics challenges are frequently different than those studied in the mindset literature. We show that, in the landscape of college physics challenges, mindset beliefs cannot always be considered to be the dominant factor in how students respond to challenge. Broadly, our coding scheme helps the field move beyond broad Likert-scale survey measures of students' mindset beliefs

Sequential Logistic Regression: A Method to Reveal Subtlety in Self-Efficacy

This paper uses self-efficacy to predict the success of women in introductory physics. We show how sequential logistic regression demonstrates the predictive ability of self-efficacy, and reveals variations with type of physics course. Also discussed are the sources of self-efficacy that have the largest impact on predictive ability

Negative Energy: Why Interdisciplinary Physics Requires Multiple Ontologies

Much recent work in physics education research has focused on ontological metaphors for energy, particularly the substance ontology and its pedagogical affordances. The concept of negative energy problematizes the substance ontology for energy, but in many instructional settings, the specific difficulties around negative energy are outweighed by the general advantages of the substance ontology. However, we claim that our interdisciplinary setting (a physics class that builds deep connections to biology and chemistry) leads to a different set of considerations and conclusions. In a course designed to draw interdisciplinary connections, the centrality of chemical bond energy in biology necessitates foregrounding negative energy from the beginning. We argue that the emphasis on negative energy requires a combination of substance and location ontologies. The location ontology enables energies both "above" and "below" zero. We present preliminary student data that illustrate difficulties in reasoning about negative energy, and the affordances of the location metaphor.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to PERC 2013 Proceeding