Students are partnered with in many different cases of physics departmental change projects, both in course transformation and in larger programmatic change. Students bring diverse forms of expertise and continue to develop their skills as part of these teams. One form of this expertise is tied to their lived experiences within physics programs and their unique perspectives that are not accessible to faculty members. While this form of expertise plays an important role in developing authentic change projects to address students’ needs, framing student expertise only through the “student perspective” limits their ability to bring in other forms of expertise such as community activism, work experiences, and group work skills. In this talk, we will share how this plays out within various change team settings through student and faculty interviews and observations of team meetings. We will illustrate the ways in which what counts as students’ expertise is narrowed, but also how it is expanded, within team processes. Through identifying the impacts on the change efforts pursued, we will identify how teams can recognize the variety of skills that students bring and how students can continue to grow in their expertise.

Prior studies have shown that students’ perception of the inclusiveness of the learning environment statistically significantly predicts their academic and motivational outcomes in physics classes. In this study, we investigated students’ experiences in introductory physics courses and how these experiences shape their perceptions of the inclusiveness of the learning environment. The findings can be useful in creating equitable and inclusive learning environments in which all students can thrive.

San Francisco State University, a hispanic serving institution, is home of the Alma Project, which was created to promote and affirm students identities in order to increase inclusivity in STEM. It started in 2018 in supplemental instruction classes, and was later implemented in all introductory physics and astronomy labs. The Alma project uses reflective journaling in these classes in order to center students' experiences in STEM. Iterative thematic coding was used to analyze surveys taken by students on how the ALMA reflective journaling influenced their personal experiences and learning in the classroom, and the effect it had on the overall classroom environment. We’ve gathered over 3000 survey responses from Spring 2020 to Spring 2023 in our conceptual astronomy, conceptual physics, general physics, and calculus-based physics courses. We've established 42 themes from our surveys, organized in categories of negatives, positives, and implementation. The results of the surveys demonstrated an overwhelming positive experience from the students. Major examples include relieving stress, understanding themselves better, enhancing a sense of purpose for their future, and feeling a connection to their classmates. The majority of the responses that were coded as negative were that students felt neutral or that journaling had no impact on their experience in the classroom.

Self-efficacy, one's confidence in their ability to complete a task, has been shown to be a predictor of students' science performance and persistence. Traditionally, self-efficacy has been studied at the beginning and end of the semester to gain insights into the impacts on students' self-efficacy, which may be influenced by one's memory. To reduce the influence of memory, we designed an explanatory sequential mixed methods approach to capture moments from daily life that may threaten or support one's self-efficacy closer to when they occur. To capture such moments, we paired the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) with individualized daily journal reflections. This method allowed us to capture the impact of a breadth of undergraduate experiences, such as coursework, being a learning assistant, or working as an undergraduate researcher in a research lab, on one's self-efficacy. In this talk, we will present a case study examining how participating in these different activities influenced a physics undergraduate student's self-efficacy across several semesters.