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arXiv · 2601.09878

Studying Impact and Intent of Design: Conjecture Mapping for Affect-Centered Analysis

Sarah McHale·Tor Ole B. Odden·Ken Heller
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Abstract

Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality has centered cognitive impacts rather than affective impacts, so little is known about the affective outcomes of holistically integrating computation into physics courses. To address that need, we present a case study of a multi-day activity within a computationally integrated modern physics laboratory course. With data from ethnographic course observations and semi-structured interviews, we introduce a novel modification of conjecture mapping to distinguish between the professor's intent behind the activity design and the impact on a student's physics computational literacy and physics identity. In doing so, we highlight the methodological suitability of conjecture mapping for comparing the intent and impact of curricular design and explicate the specific misalignments that led to different affective outcomes than intended.

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Sarah McHale, Tor Ole B. Odden, Ken Heller. 2026-01-14. Studying Impact and Intent of Design: Conjecture Mapping for Affect-Centered Analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09878

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