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Designing physics courses that support students' activation and development of expert-like physics epistemologies is a significant goal of Physics Education Research. However, very little research has focused on how physics students' interactions with course structures resonate with different epistemological views. As part of a course redesign effort to increase student success in introductory physics, we interviewed introductory physics students about their experiences with course structures and their learning and belonging beliefs. We present here a case from this broader data corpus in which a student, Robyn, discusses his epistemological views of physics problem solving and his experiences with physics lectures, office hours, and discussion sections. We find that Robyn's physics epistemology manifests consistently across his interactions with each of these different course structures, suggesting a possible resonance between students' beliefs and their experiences with course structures and the value of further investigation into the potential merits of comprehensive course design. 

The transfer of knowledge within and across disciplines remains a compelling challenge for modern STEM education and further research is needed to expand on the student-exhibited cognitive and affective gains achieved by innovative cross-disciplinary STEM instructional techniques. This study seeks to support crossdisciplinary STEM instruction and learning by investigating how students use the first law of thermodynamics, a crucial principle to the crosscutting concept of energy and matter, to bridge across disciplinary boundaries. An interview study was undertaken wherein chemistry-, engineering-, and physics-major students addressed a common set of conceptual prompts written with different field-specific conventions. This report focuses on students’ interpretations of the provided forms of the first law and work equations between prompts. Emergent findings demonstrate field-specific interpretations of arbitrary differences in convention and strong barriers to transfer. Derived implications inform suggestions for scaffolding across such disciplinary differences and for future work in this area. 

Researchers across all scientific disciplines routinely face ethical decisions in their work, from addressing conflicts of interest to deciding whether and how to make data available for reproducibility. To help strengthen their ethical reasoning skills, they are encouraged to take online training programs like the CITI program. Ethics training is insufficient for improving ethical behavior. Better understanding of how scientists make decisions and reason about ethics is needed. To develop that understanding, we need expanded, asset-based measures of ethical reasoning that can be applied to open-ended responses and discussions. As part of a year-long intervention on a group of fifteen scientists' value-based reasoning, we conducted pre/post interviews that included open-ended questions about ethical scenarios. For this paper, we explore an application of three theories of ethical and stakeholder reasoning to those answers, and determine that we can use them to examine quality, principles, and subjects of their reasoning in open responses. 

Many of the activities and cognitive processes that physicists use while solving problems are "invisible" to students, which can hinder their acquisition of important expert-like skills. Whereas the detailed calculations performed by researchers are often published in journals and textbooks, other activities such as those undertaken while planning how to approach a problem are rarely discussed in published research. Hence, these activities are especially hidden from students. To better understand how physicists solve problems in their professional research, we leveraged the framework of cognitive task analysis to conduct semi-structured interviews with theoretical physicists (N=11). Here we elucidate the role of planning and preliminary analysis in theorists' work. Theorists described using a variety of activities in order to decide if their project was doable while also generating possible solution paths. These actions included doing cursory calculations, reflecting on previous knowledge, gaining intuition and understanding by studying prior work, and reproducing previous results. We found that theorists typically did not pursue projects unless they had a clear idea of what the outcome of their project would be, or at least knew that they would be able to make progress on the problem. Thus, this preliminary design and analysis phase was highly important for theorists despite being largely hidden from students. We conclude by suggesting potential ways to incorporate our findings into the classroom to give students more numerous opportunities to engage in these expert-like practices. 

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. 

While understanding laboratory equipment is an important learning goal of physics laboratory (lab) instruction, previous studies have found inequities as to who gets to use equipment in in-person lab classes. With the transition to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, class dynamics changed and the effects on equipment usage remain unclear. As part of a larger effort to make intro physics labs more equitable, we investigated student equipment usage based on gender and race in two introductory physics lab courses, one taught in-person and one taught remotely. We found inequities between men and women for in-person instruction, replicating previous work with a new student population. In contrast, we found that remote instruction created a more gender equitable learning environment, albeit with one student typically in charge of the equipment per class session. When we looked at equipment handling based on student race, we found no inequities in either format. These results suggest that changes should be made in introductory labs to create a more gender equitable learning environment and that some aspects of remote labs could help make these labs more equitable. 

Students' use of support from peers and instructors is an important aspect of success in college. This preliminary phenomenographic study examines a variety of help seeking behaviors of undergraduate majors in physics and life sciences and factors that lead to those behaviors. Seven students described their experiences using semi-structured interviews during the summer of 2021. The analysis was structured around identifying characteristics of peers and instructors, as well as personal help-seeking attitudes, that either promoted help seeking or help avoidance. Peers were generally the first source of help, and were prioritized based on ability and the closeness of the relationship. Instructors fostered help seeking through availability and a non-judgemental demeanor. A feeling of vulnerability and fear of judgement was cited as the most common reason for avoiding help. The findings provide insights for faculty and departments seeking to encourage student success. 

Learning physics in any context, including undergraduate research experiences (UREs), requires learning its concepts and the relational structure between those new concepts with what students already know. We use concept maps, a knowledge elicitation method, for assessing mentees' and mentors' knowledge structures during Research Experience for Undergraduates programs. The study looked at maps from seven mentor-mentee pairs to understand how mentors and mentees use specific knowledge and strategies during the development of their concept maps. A qualitative analysis of the maps showed mentors and mentees differed in their ways of organizing and displaying their knowledge in terms of structure, scale, language, and use of conceptual and procedural knowledge. For instance, mentees used more procedural knowledge. It is perhaps due to their perception of finishing their REU projects and the fact that they may have only limited and superficial knowledge of specific topics. However, mentors' maps were smaller but more significant in using more comprehensive conceptual knowledge and connecting their maps to the broader scientific context. 

Numerous studies have identified gender inequity in how students divide roles in lab courses. Few studies, however, have probed how these inequities impact women's experimental physics identity development. In this work, we used closed-response surveys to investigate which lab tasks students view as part of "doing physics" and how these designations varied by gender. In both courses, we found that most students viewed working with the experimental apparatus, taking lab notes, doing data analysis, and thinking about the physics theory behind the experiment as part of doing physics. Only 50% of students, however, viewed managing the group progress as part of doing physics. While men and women's views did not vary in the first-semester lab course, in the third-semester course women were more likely to view notes and managing as part of doing physics than were men. Given that previous research has indicated that women are more likely to take on managing and note-taking roles than men, our results suggest that women may be receiving less recognition as physicists from their peers, which may hinder their experimental physics identity development.