As a result of the pandemic, many physics courses moved online. Alongside, the popularity of Internet-based problem-solving sites and forums rose. With the emergence of large language models, another shift occurred. One year into the public availability of these models, how has online help-seeking behavior among introductory physics students…

Existing research identifying common student ideas about forces focuses on students' misunderstandings, misconceptions, and difficulties. In this paper, we characterize student thinking in terms of resources, framing student thinking as continuous with formal physics. Based on our analysis of 2048 written responses to conceptual questions, we…

Physics classes with computation integrated into the curriculum are a fitting setting for investigating computational thinking. In this paper, we present a framework for exploring this topic in introductory physics courses. The framework, which was developed by reviewing relevant literature and acquiring video data from high school classrooms,…

Massive pretrained language models have garnered attention and controversy due to their ability to generate humanlike responses: Attention due to their frequent indistinguishability from human-generated phraseology and narratives and controversy due to the fact that their convincingly presented arguments and facts are frequently simply false. Just…

At large institutions of higher education, students frequently have a choice whether to attend the introductory physics sequence asynchronously online, on-site in a traditional lecture setting, or in a reformed studio setting. In this study, we investigate how these different settings are correlated with measures of self-efficacy, interest in…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The communities of practice framework has become an essential framework for understanding identity development both in physics education research (PER) and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, more broadly. However, the use of communities…

Despite the growing presence of students as partners (SAP) in education research and the overlap of goals with learning assistant (LA) programs, there is little research done on pedagogy- and curriculum-focused student partnerships that involve LAs. LAs have expertise as both teachers and learners, so why not leverage this expertise to improve the…

An increasing number of introductory physics courses are seeking to incorporate "authentic practices," and a large area of focus in this trend is the incorporation of computational problems into the curriculum. These problems offer students an opportunity to engage with the programming practices and numerical problem-solving methods used…

A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in students' beliefs on the relevance of physics but frequently the results show a negative shift in students'…

The term "weight" has multiple related meanings in both scientific and everyday usage. Even among experts and in textbooks, weight is ambiguously defined as either the gravitational force on an object or operationally as the magnitude of the force an object exerts on a measuring scale. This poses both conceptual and language difficulties…

Learning Analytics (LA) has been identified as one of the top technology trends in higher education today (Johnson et al., 2013). LA is based on the idea that datasets generated through normal administrative, teaching, or learning activities--such as registrar data or interactions with learning management systems--can be analyzed to enhance…

In an introductory physics sequence with a large enrollment of premedical students, traditional recitation sessions were replaced by "Tutorials in Introductory Physics," developed by the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington. Initially, summative test scores (as well as FCI scores) dramatically increased, but so did…