We report on the result of 30 1-hour, semi-structured interviews with introductory physics students conducted to investigate their experiences with our local course structures. This effort is part of a larger course transformation project to increase student success in introductory physics at the University of Illinois. In this talk, we will examine how students’ beliefs, motivations, and emotions are tied to their perceptions of course features and will propose that they can reinforce one another in bidirectional ways — students’ beliefs, motivations, and emotions can impact their perceptions of course structures, and students’ experiences with course structures can impact their beliefs, motivations, and emotions. We will present examples from student interviews to illustrate this bidirectional hypothesis. By understanding how students’ experiences arise out of interaction between their own beliefs, motivations, and emotions with specific course structures, we hope to uncover useful design principles for fostering student success and well-being.

sSense of belonging is an essential human motivation that has also been shown to be critical to students’ success in their undergraduate careers. This study investigates sense of belonging for students enrolled in an upper division physics course. A 23-item survey measuring sense of belonging and other factors related to students’ identity was administered in a student-centered Modern Physics course at the beginning and end of the semester. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to establish a measure of sense of belonging and the data was tested for significant changes in students’ sense of belonging as well as associations to other salient identity outcomes. Findings show that sense of belonging had a significant positive gain over the semester. Also, sense of belonging is significantly correlated with two other factors that have been shown to contribute to physics identity

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were widely felt, but how did those effects translate in the undergraduate physics classroom upon return to face-to-face learning after nearly a year and a half of remote learning? This presentation focuses on a study conducted at a large eastern United States land-grant university examining these effects. The study compares the last two fully face-to-face semesters pre-pandemic and the first two fully face-to-face post-pandemic semesters of an introductory calculus-based electricity and magnetism course. Measures such as high school preparation (high school GPA, ACT/SAT scores, and conceptual pretest scores), in-class behavior (submission rates for homework and lecture attendance), and in-class achievement (homework and test averages) were examined. While some changes were detected, they were generally small effects.