I've come to understand my role as being the tactful coach who comes to work to help students (during a particularly sensitive time in their life). Learning how typical scenarios in physics class represent a face threat has helped me to proactively guide frustrated students toward productive practices (rather than react defensively). I now start design decisions for a new course with (about two) research-validated techniques while keeping design elements modest for the first year, so that students do not experience the unnecessary frustrations inevitable when a teacher's ambitions are unrealistic for that term. I would never again give a test (in an introductory class) designed to allow a heavily-weighted low-F score with an otherwise decent test performance. Every time I have given students more agency in my classes, rather than micromanaging their class-time experience, I have been impressed with their ability to respond like intelligent humans. 

This talk will present preliminary results of an effort to add explicit self-regulated learning instruction to a college calculus-based introductory physics class. Students received short instructional segments on general self-regulation strategies, the metacognitive and cognitive reasons those strategies were often successful, and specific strategies useful in the college physics environment. Students were encouraged to reflect on the success of their past strategies and to report their planned future study strategies through four surveys given monthly throughout the semester. Students rated which strategies were successful and which they intended to try in the future.

Working in groups, or collaborative teamwork is often a part of active learning strategies increasingly implemented in undergraduate physics classrooms (e.g. project-based learning, team-based learning, or peer instruction). Existing research suggests student learning outcomes are largely positive in classes that use pedagogical practices with collaborative teamwork components compared to direct instruction. In this presentation, I will discuss a mixed methods study of student teamwork expectations that reveals that while collaborative teamwork can promote conceptual physics understanding, it can also introduce student stressors, largely absent in lecture-based courses. I also analyze students’ sense of psychological safety, the degree to which a person feels comfortable taking risks within a group. This analysis reveals that not all students feel equally psychologically safe contributing in a collaborative physics classroom context. This research has implications for how collaborative learning can be fostered to engage all students equitably within their teams in undergraduate physics courses.

How do you get every student in your classroom to contribute to group work or group discussions? How do you increase equity by building on student strengths? This session will introduce strategies for functioning student groups and how to intentionally use quick games to prepare students for the communication/language tasks needed in classwork. Increase student engagement and help students learn how to collaborate; help the Physics go faster because kids are more comfortable speaking up and working together.

Encouraging collaborative learning processes has become increasingly common in physics education. In a classroom for future k-8 teachers, students are presented tasks explicitly designed to trigger confusion and expected to resolve it as a group. At Chico State and Western Washington University, we are examining how students engage in these settings. We explore the activity reported with the highest levels of confusion and stress by the students, which coincides with the highest amount of mathematical procedures in the course. This case study follows a group that had difficulties collaborating with each other. We use Borge’s socio-metacognition framework which outlines communication patterns of collaborative knowledge building discourse amongst peers working towards synthesizing and negotiating new knowledge. We video recorded the classroom's interactions, and performed follow-up interviews to learn more about students’ backgrounds and reflect on classroom video excerpts. We further explore the sources that impede students to engage in productive collaboration. 

I participated in a ongoing multi-semester, university wide effort whose purpose is to improve the student attitudes about college with the ultimate goal of increased retention and graduation rates among underrepresented students in STEM at an open enrollment, mid-sized public university. I will discuss the impact these interventions had on student perceptions of physics and on DFW (Drop, Fail, Withdraw) rates in a calculus based physics class (both physics 1 and physics 2) over the course of four semesters, as compared to previous semesters before the interventions were implemented.

Physics misconceptions and implicit biases share crucial characteristics:  they come from (at best) casual and unscrutinized observations; though seldom if ever articulated, they are used as bases for reasoning and decisions; they are sustained by strong confirmation bias, and consequently are difficult to root out.  I will discuss my experience making this connection explicit in my classes.  Doing so makes it easier for students to consider that they may harbor implicit biases, by showing that biases do not necessarily originate from some moral failure.  It can then motivate them to make the requisite effort to eradicate their misconceptions, thereby developing the mental tools needed to eradicate their implicit biases.  This suggests a way to start discussing implicit bias with a larger population, by first introducing the idea in a context that is not emotive and has no moral dimension.

Research has indicated that students who are more metacognitive during physics problem solving are more likely to correctly solve physics problems. Metacognition is defined as the ability to reflect upon, understand, and control one’s learning.  Metacognitive skills enable individuals to monitor their knowledge and skill levels, plan and allocate learning resources efficiently, and evaluate their learning state.  Evaluation, one of six subcomponents of metacognition, involves appraising the products and regulatory processes of one’s learning.  In this project, we investigate students' ability to evaluate their homework solutions in one semester of an introductory project-based physics course.  We address whether students’ ability to evaluate their solutions improves over the semester or whether it is dependent on the physics question.  Through this work we hope to better understand the metacognitive ability of introductory physics students so future work can focus on promoting physics problem-solving skills.

In a science classroom setting, most of the experimentations are done in groups. In this research, we will be looking at the students' approach to data collection and analysis in order to understand how they confront and resolve the difference. Through a collaboration with CSU Chico and Western Washington University, we present a case study on how a group of three pre-service teachers has different perspectives on how to engage in an experiment. We use video recordings of the students’ classroom interactions, and in-the-moment surveys recording their emotions (confusion, stress, frustration). We performed follow-up interviews where students look back at their interactions and reflect on their experiences. We use Borges’s socio-metacognition framework to analyze students’ interactions. We present how students engage in high-quality claims and explore alternative ideas.