arXiv subjects

Eleanor C. Sayre

Publications and source records attributed to Eleanor C. Sayre.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Emerging STEM education researchers' positioning and perception of discipline-based education research

Various motivations bring researchers to discipline-based education research (DBER), but there is little research on their conceptualization of and navigation into this new-to-them area of research. We use phenomenography to analyze interview data collected from twenty-eight emerging STEM education researchers to gain a better understanding of how they perceive themselves within DBER and what they perceive it to be. Grounded in the figured worlds theoretical framework, we identify the spectrum of ways emerging STEM education researchers identify or project themselves into this new space: to improve their teaching, to make it their new primary research field, and/or to negotiate how it will fit with their primary one. We also highlight salient negotiations that emerge because of the close ties between DBER and disciplinary science, which provides us with a better understanding of emerging researchers' perceptions. This work generates insight into the kinds of professional development opportunities that would support emerging education researchers within STEM departments and the broader DBER community.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2023

Emerging Physics Education Researchers' Growth in Professional Agency: Case Study

Improving the physics enterprise to broaden participation in physics is one of the main goals of the physics education research community. Many classically trained physics faculty transition during their faculty career into engaging in research investigating the teaching and learning of their discipline. There is scarce research on the support and needs of these faculty as they engage in their first projects in this new research field for them. We investigate agency growth of two emerging physics education researchers and one emerging mathematics education researcher as they participate in a professional development program. We ground our case study analysis of interview data in a theoretical framework on agency. We identify the elements of the professional development program that were transformative in our case study participants' trajectory in education research. Receiving get-started information, building mechanisms to sustain research projects and engaging with a supportive community help participants transform general interests to specific questions, articulate concrete next-steps and increase their sense of self-efficacy. During this professional development program all three case study participants gain agency in this new area of research for them. These identified program elements that affect agency growth can inform professional development opportunities for faculty transitioning into discipline-based education research, which expands our understanding of how to build capacity in the field.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2023

Motivation and needs of informal physics practitioners

Physicists engage with the public to varying degrees at different stages of their careers. However, their public engagement covers many activities, events, and audiences, making their motivations and professional development needs not well understood. As part of ongoing efforts to build and support community in the informal physics space, we conducted interviews with physicists with a range of different experiences in public engagement. We use personas methodology and self-determination theory to articulate their public engagement motivation, challenges, and needs. We present our set of three personas: the physicist who engages in informal physics for self-reflection, the physicist who wants to spark interest and understanding in physics, and the physicist who wants to provide diverse role models to younger students and inspire them to pursue a STEM career. Needs covered a range of resources including science communication training, community building among informal physics practitioners, and mechanisms to recognize, elevate and value informal physics. By bringing user-centered design methodology to a new topical area of physics education research, we expand our understanding of motivations and needs of practitioners in physics public engagement. Therefore, departments, organizations and institutions could draw upon the personas developed to consider the ways to better support physicists in their respective environment.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Case Study: Context Interactions & Physics Faculty's Professional Development

This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different institutions over a year and a half using three semi-structured interviews each. The data enabled the identification of relevant context elements; and the impact of these elements on physics faculty was explored by adapting a framework that examines instructors' professional development. The analysis shows that both case study subjects used their physics expertise and growing understanding of their context to develop their physics teaching. However, this growth was enacted differently given the nature of their context, highlighting instructors' strengths in navigating their local context to improve their physics teaching. The results show the subtleties of how context has a salient, complex, and evolving role in moderating faculty's professional development. By taking a faculty-centric approach, this paper broadens the community's awareness of the ways physics instructors develop their physics teaching. This work contributes to a relatively new lens by which the physics community views, discusses, and supports the professional development of physics faculty.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

What do equitable physics lab groups look like in light of inchargeness?

In physics labs, students experience a wide range of equitable and inequitable interactions. We developed a methodology to characterize different lab groups in terms of their bid exchanges and inchargeness. An equitable group is one in which every student's bids are heard and acknowledged. Our analysis of equitable and inequitable groups raises questions about how inchargeness and gender interact to affect the functionality of a lab group.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

How Physics Textbooks Embed Meaning in the Equals Sign

Physics as a discipline embeds conceptual meaning about the physical world in mathematical formalism. The meaning associated with mathematical symbols depends on context, and physicists can shift conceptual meaning by manipulating those symbols. We present an analysis of the different physical meanings associated with the equal sign "=" that can be inferred from introductory and upper--level physics textbooks. Five distinct meanings/categories are identified: causality, balancing, definitional, assignment, and calculation, each with operational definitions that help identify their presence. The different uses can be seen to link mathematical equations to intuitive conceptual ideas, and significant differences in the frequency with which these are used exist between textbooks of different levels.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

PhysPort use and growth: Supporting physics teaching with research-based resources since 2011

PhysPort (www.physport.org) has become the go-to place for physics faculty to learn to apply research-based teaching and assessment in their classrooms. Usage has doubled every two years since the site was released in 2011, and 20% of all U.S. physics faculty are now verified educators on PhysPort. The lead author conceived of PhysPort in 2007 after meeting many physics faculty interested in incorporating results of physics education research (PER) in their classrooms but with no idea where to start. At the time, most PER results were buried in research journals not accessible to ordinary physics educators, and there was no central place to learn about results and implications for classroom practice. Throughout its development, PhysPort has been based on user research: we interview physics faculty about their needs, design the site based on those needs, and conduct usability testing to see how we meet those needs. PhysPort is a joint product of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and Kansas State University (K-State), with contributions from many universities, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and a library within the ComPADRE.org digital library. The site (originally called the PER User's Guide) was first funded by an NSF grant in 2009 and released in November 2011. This article presents an overview of resources on PhysPort, discussion of research and development of the site, and data on the continuing growth of site usage.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

Beyond teaching methods: highlighting physics faculty's strengths and agency

Much work in physics education research (PER) characterizes faculty teaching practice in terms of whether faculty use specific named PER-based teaching methods, either with fidelity or with adaptation; we call this research paradigm the "teaching-method-centered paradigm." However, most faculty do not frame their teaching in terms of which particular named methods they use, but rather in terms of their own ideas and values, suggesting that the teaching-method-centered paradigm misses key features of faculty teaching. These key features include the productive ideas that faculty have about student learning and faculty agency around teaching. We present three case studies of faculty talking about their teaching, and analyze them in terms of two theoretical frameworks: a framework of teaching principles (How Learning Works) and a framework of faculty agency (Self-Determination Theory). We show that these frameworks well characterize key features of faculty teaching practices and agency, and can be combined in a new paradigm for modeling faculty teaching which we call an "asset-based agentic paradigm." We therefore encourage physics education researchers to move beyond the teaching-method-centered paradigm and think about faculty teaching using an asset-based agentic paradigm.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

Positioning in groups: The roles of expertise and being in charge

Inchargeness is associated with one's authority in driving the activity in collaboration. We study how inchargeness changes within a collaborative group when its members have differing expertise. We present a case study of a group of three students working in an upper division undergraduate physics laboratory. One of them has less on-task expertise than her peers due to missing a day, which reduces her relative inchargeness across two storylines: "catching up" and "moving forward".

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2018

Studying community development: a network analytical approach

Research shows that community plays a central role in learning, and strong community engages students and aids in student persistence. Thus, understanding the function and structure of communities in learning environments is essential to education. We use social network analysis to explore the community dynamics of students in a pre-matriculation, two-week summer program. Unlike previous network analysis studies in PER, we build our networks from classroom video that has been coded for student interactions using labeled, directed ties. We define 3 types of interaction: on task interactions (regarding the assigned task), on topic interactions (having to do with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)), and off topic interactions (unrelated to the assignment or STEM). To study the development of community in this program, we analyze the shift in conversation topicality over the course of the program. Conversations are more on-task toward the end of the program and we propose that this conversational shift represents a change in student membership within their forming community.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2017

Using Social Network Analysis on classroom video data

We propose a novel application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) using classroom video data as a means of quantitatively and visually exploring the collaborations between students. The context for our study was a summer program that works with first generation students and deaf/hard-of-hearing students to engage in authentic science practice and develop a supportive community. We applied SNA to data from one activity during the two-week program to test our approach and as a means to begin to assess whether the goals of the program are being met. We used SNA to identify groups that were interacting in unexpected ways and then to highlight how individuals were contributing to the overall group behavior. We plan to expand our new use of SNA to video data on a larger scale.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2017

Varied reasoning schema in students' written solutions

The Mathematization project investigates students' use of mathematical tools across the undergraduate physics curriculum. As a part of this project, we look at intermediate mechanics students' written homework solutions to understand how they use these tools in approaching traditional mechanics problems. We use a modified version of the ACER (Activation-Construction-Execution-Reflection) framework to analyze students' solutions and to identify patterns of mathematical skills used on traditional problems. We apply techniques borrowed from network analysis and the Resources Framework to build a "fingerprint" of students' mathematical tool use. In this paper, we present preliminary findings on patterns that we identified in students' problem solving.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2017

Student understanding of electric and magnetic fields in materials

We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and magnetism course. We examine how these clusters change with time and context. The evidence shows that students benefit from activating resources related to the internal structure of the atom when thinking about electric fields and their effect on materials. We argue that facilitating activation of certain resources by the instructor in the classroom can affect the plasticity of those resources in the student, making them more solid and easily activated. We find that the wording of the questions posed to students affects which resources are activated, and that students often fill in resources to link known phenomena to phenomena described by the question when lacking detailed mental models.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2017

Personas as a Powerful Methodology to Design Targeted Professional Development Resources

Scaling and sustaining educational innovations is a common problem in the learning sciences. Professional development resources around educational innovations that are personalized to appeal to the needs and motivations of different types of faculty offer a possible solution. The method of developing personas to represent key types of users is commonly employed in user-interface design and can be used to produce personalized resources. Personas are fictional named archetypes of users encompassing generalizations of their key characteristics and goals that emerge from interviews. This method is especially powerful because personas succinctly package information into the form of a person, who is easily understood and reasoned about. Herein we describe the creation of a set of personas focusing on the needs and motivations of physics faculty around assessment and teaching. We present the personas, a discussion of how they inform our design and how the method can be used more broadly.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2016

Best Practices for Administering Concept Inventories

There are a plethora of concept inventories in physics available for faculty to use, but it is not always clear exactly why you would use these tests, or how you should administer them and interpret the results. These multiple-choice research-based tests about physics concepts are valuable because they allow for standardized comparisons among institutions, instructors, or over time. In order for these comparisons to be meaningful, you should use best practices for administering the tests. Here we discuss best practices for administering concept inventories including background on these types of tests and specifics of how to give them online or in-class. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of different incentives you could give your students, interpretation of scores and common concerns you may have about using concept inventories.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2016

Secondary Analysis of Teaching Methods in Introductory Physics: a 50k-Student Study

Physics education researchers have developed many evidence-based instructional strategies to enhance physics students' conceptual learning. These strategies have historically been tested using assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE). We have performed a review and analysis of FCI and FMCE data published between 1995 and 2014. We confirm previous findings that interactive engagement teaching techniques are significantly more likely to produce high student learning gains than traditional lecture-based instruction. We also establish that interactive engagement instruction works in many settings, including for students with a high and low level of prior knowledge, for liberal arts and research universities, and for small and large class sizes.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2015

How physics instruction impacts students' beliefs about learning physics: A meta-analysis of 24 studies

In this meta-analysis, we synthesize the results of 24 studies using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and the Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) to answer several questions: (1) How does physics instruction impact students' beliefs? (2) When do physics majors develop expert-like beliefs? and (3) How do students' beliefs impact their learning of physics? We report that in typical physics classes, students' beliefs deteriorate or at best stay the same. There are a few types of interventions, including an explicit focus on model-building and/or developing expert- like beliefs that lead to significant improvements in beliefs. Further, small courses and those for elementary education and non-science majors also result in improved beliefs. However, because the available data oversamples certain types of classes, it is unclear whether these improvements are actually due to the interventions, or due to the small class size, or student population typical of the kinds of classes in which these interventions are most often used. Physics majors tend to enter their undergraduate education with more expert-like beliefs than non-majors and these beliefs remain relatively stable throughout their undergraduate careers. Thus, typical physics courses appear to be selecting students who already have strong beliefs, rather than supporting students in developing strong beliefs. There is a small correlation between students' incoming beliefs about physics and their gains on conceptual mechanics surveys. This suggests that students with more expert-like incoming beliefs may learn more in their physics courses, but this finding should be further explored and replicated. Some unanswered questions remain. To answer these questions, we advocate several specific types of future studies.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2015

Identity statuses in upper-division physics students

We use the theories of identity statuses and communities of practice to describe three different case studies of students finding their paths through undergraduate physics and developing a physics subject-specific identity. Each case study demonstrates a unique path that reinforces the link between the theories of communities of practice and identity statuses. The case studies also illustrate how students progress and regress in their commitment to their subject-specific identities and their professional identities. The progression/regression is dependent on their willingness to explore different aspects of a physics professional identity and their availability to carry out such exploration. Identity status and future identity crises can manifest in students' behavior in the classroom. Allowing students to engage in more legitimate practices of the physics community, especially in the form of undergraduate research, helps students to explore their opportunities and inform the level of commitment they wish to make to physics.

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