Search for: All records

Abstract Research suggests that interacting with more peers about physics course material is correlated with higher student performance. Some studies, however, have demonstrated that different topics of peer interactions may correlate with their performance in different ways, or possibly not at all. In this study, we probe both the peers with whom students interact about their physics course and the particular aspects of the course material about which they interacted in six different introductory physics courses: four lecture courses and two lab courses. Drawing on social network analysis methods, we replicate prior work demonstrating that, on average, students who interact with more peers in their physics courses have higher final course grades. Expanding on this result, we find that students discuss a wide range of aspects of course material with their peers: concepts, small-group work, assessments, lecture, and homework. We observe that in the lecture courses, interacting with peers about concepts is most strongly correlated with final course grade, with smaller correlations also arising for small-group work and homework. In the lab courses, on the other hand, small-group work is the only interaction topic that significantly correlates with final course grade. We use these findings to discuss how course structures (e.g. grading schemes and weekly course schedules) may shape student interactions and add nuance to prior work by identifying how specific types of student interactions are associated (or not) with performance. 

Prior work has found inequities in what experimental roles students take on during instructional labs. Research also suggests that this role division might arise implicitly and that prompting explicit role negotiation might improve equity in lab group work. To understand these various ways students negotiate roles in their lab groups, we use the lens of positioning to analyze two different video episodes of a gender-and-race-diverse group of three students. In one episode, students implicitly take on roles through subtle negotiations and in the second episode, one student explicitly assigns roles. We find that the positioning dynamics in both episodes lead to inequitable learning experiences within the group. This inequity, moreover, occurs along gender and racial lines, prompting future work relating students' intersectional identities to their positioning dynamics in small groups.