Publications

Out-of-field teaching is a global educational challenge. In particular, many teachers whose academic background and main teaching experience is in biology are called to teach middle school physics and have limited opportunities for productive professional development. Based on previous studies, we expect these teachers to hold different epistemic cognitions from the in-field teachers. The present study builds on this epistemic diversity and offers dialogic argumentation as a means to promote mutual learning among physics teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds. We describe guidelines for designing interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation activities that aim to encourage teachers to express their disciplinary perspectives in the context of inquiry-based physics and to facilitate a deliberative discourse among them. We demonstrate in a case study the ways in which the discourse of a group of in-field and out-of-field teachers unfolds under the proposed design guidelines. Using the Actor-Network methodology and an analysis of power relations, we uncover a complex interplay between the social and the epistemic in the discourse: when interactions become more dialogic and power relations more equalized, the out-of-field teachers take an active role in the discussion, foregrounding their epistemic practices and enhancing the epistemic practices of the group, including the in-field teacher.

Inquiry practices can be integrated into various settings that differ in terms of their constraints and hence in the scope and depth of the practices that students experience. Key policy papers suggest implementing a gradual learning sequence for inquiry practices so that students\u2019 learning experiences in more constrained settings can serve them later in extended research projects. What type of learning progression in inquiry is valued by students? To answer this question, students\u2019 views were examined while progressing from inquiry-oriented instructional labs to an extended research project. This was done in the context of the Research Physics program, a three-year program consisting of an introductory stage followed by a long-term (∼18 months) research project. The group administered interactive questionnaire methodology was used to collect student reflections at the interface between the two stages of the program, both individually and in groups. Students were asked to identify inquiry practices they had encountered during the introductory stage and to evaluate their contribution to their projects. Findings showed that while students perceived the development of measurement, analysis, and self-monitoring skills as useful in preparing them for future research projects, this was not the case for the practices of teamwork and communication of knowledge. We explain these findings, using the boundary crossing theoretical lens, by looking at the different meanings these two practices take on when imported from the physicist\u2019s lab to the educational lab and suggest that this impedes the cultural boundary crossing between these two settings.

The instructional lab setting has been found to be dominated by prescribed tasks and pre-prepared lab kits. This was explained by teachers' need to guide students to simultaneously progress through a lab curriculum, which prompts them to standardize the lab experience. Nevertheless, prominent professional associations have persistently called to better represent experimental research practices in the lab, and to grant students more agency in the experimental process by orienting them towards more open-ended lab experiences. This paper reports a lab activity designed to advance students' agency in the practice of experimental design, in a setting governed by a high-stakes national matriculation exam. Three hundred teachers of advanced level high-school physics experienced the lab activity in a national network of professional learning communities (PLCs). The activity was anchored in an experiment to determine the relationship between the current through a battery and its terminal voltage. It was designed to problematize students' considerations underlying the choices of the location of the voltmeter and the measuring scale of the ammeter, and the possible implications for the validity of the experimental results; e.g. control of the variables, as well as the range and the accuracy of measurements. Teachers first performed the lab activity as learners, discussed it in the PLC meeting, and finally reflected on their experience. Individual responses to the lab worksheets and the reflections were analyzed. Initially, teachers' considerations did not portray key aspects related to the validity of the experimental results, such as how design choices related to the location of the voltmeter and the ammeter measuring scale impacted the accuracy and range of the measurements and the control of variables. The teachers were highly engaged in the peer discussion in the PLC and found the lab activity valuable in raising students' awareness of important considerations in experimental design.

Science apprenticeship programmes offer gifted and highly capable high school students the opportunity to participate in research projects in a university setting. Science apprenticeship programmes can serve the needs of these talented and curious youngsters, which are often not met in the regular school science curriculum. Such students are characterized by their motivation to apply their creativity, critical thinking and reasoning capabilities to explore in depth topics that interest and challenge them (Gardner, 2008). These needs can be accommodated via research apprenticeships that embody the complexity of authentic scientific investigations (Taber, 2007). It is thus expected that participation in cutting-edge scientific research projects foster these students\u2019 enthusiasm for learning science.

We describe an elective course on soft matter at the level of introductory physics. Soft matter physics serves as a context that motivates the presentation of basic ideas in statistical thermodynamics and their applications. It also is an example of a contemporary field that is interdisciplinary and touches on chemistry, biology, and physics. We outline a curriculum that uses the lattice gas model as a quantitative and visual tool, initially to introduce entropy, and later to facilitate the calculation of interactions. We demonstrate how free energy minimization can be used to teach students to understand the properties of soft matter systems such as the phases of fluid mixtures, wetting of interfaces, self-assembly of surfactants, and polymers. We discuss several suggested activities in the form of inquiry projects which allow students to apply the concepts they have learned to experimental systems.

This study investigates how the beliefs and values of physics faculty influence their choice of physics problems for their students in an introductory physics course. The study identifies the goals these instructors have for their students, the problem features they believe facilitate those goals, and how those features correspond to problems they choose to use in their classes. This analysis comes from an artifact-based interview of 30 physics faculty teaching introductory calculus-based physics at a wide variety of institutions. The study concludes that instructors' goals and the problem features they believe support those goals align with researchbased curricular materials intended to develop competent problem solvers. However, many of these instructors do not use the beneficial problem features because they believe these features conflict with a more powerful set of values concerned with clarity of presentation and minimizing student stress, especially on exams.

Previously we discussed how well students in an introductory physics course diagnosed their mistakes on a quiz problem with different levels of scaffolding support. In that case, the problem they self-diagnosed was unusually difficult. We also discussed issues related to transfer, particularly the fact that the transfer problem in the midterm that corresponded to the self-diagnosed problem was a far transfer problem. Here, we discuss a related intervention in which we repeated the study methodology with the same students in the same intervention groups, using a new quiz problem which was more typical for these students and a near transfer problem. We discuss how these changes affected students ability to self-diagnose and transfer from the self-diagnosed quiz problem to a transfer problem on the midterm exam.

Self-diagnosis tasks aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. The recitation classes in an introductory physics class (similar to 200 students) were split into a control group and three experimental groups in which different levels of guidance were provided for performing the self-diagnosis activities. We have been a) investigating how students in each group performed on subsequent near and far transfer questions given as part of the exams, and b) comparing student's initial scores on their quizzes with their performance on the exams. as well as comparing student's self-diagnosis scores with their performance on the exams. We discuss some hypotheses about the students' ability to self-diagnose with different levels of scaffolding support and emphasize the importance of teaching students how to diagnosis their own mistakes. Our findings suggest that struggling with minimal Support during in-class self-diagnosis can trigger out-of-class self-diagnosis. Students therefore may be motivated to make sense of the problem they may have not been able to self diagnose, whether independently or in a collaborative effort.

Transfer is required in nearly every activity of problem solving. It spans from transferring procedures within a finite set of similar "end of the chapter problems" to applying problem solving strategies in completely unfamiliar problems. Students' self-perceptions, in the context of problem solving and learning, influence the success of instruction promoting transfer. Hence, teachers have to attend to such self-perceptions. We conducted a cooperative inquiry workshop to support teachers who modify their instruction in problem solving to better achieve transfer goals. As part of the workshop, the teachers raised the need to develop a questionnaire examining students' self-perceptions in the context of problem solving and learning in physics. The development of the questionnaire was supported by educational research, in a manner reflecting the teachers' motivation and time limits. In this paper, we describe the process of developing the questionnaire, present findings from a validation analysis of the questionnaire, and discuss its role in the teachers' professional development.

Grading sends a direct message to students about what is expected in class. However, often there is a gap between the assigned grade and the goals of the instructor. In an interview study of faculty teaching calculus-based introductory physics, we verified that this gap exists and identified three themes that appear to shape grading decisions: (1) a desire to see student reasoning, (2) a reluctance to deduct points from a student solution that might be correct, and (3) a tendency to project correct thought processes onto a student solution. When all three themes were expressed by an instructor, the resulting conflict was resolved by placing the burden of proof on either the instructor or the student. The weighting of the themes with the burden of proof criterion explains our finding that although almost all instructors reported telling students to show their reasoning in problem solutions, about half graded problem solutions in a way that would likely discourage students from Showing this reasoning.