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The past several years has seen increased interest in expanding physics education research (PER) studies to the two-year college (TYC) physics community. This interest is driven by the knowledge that while a significant portion of the students taking introductory physics courses do so at TYCs, those students are highly underrepresented in PER. The considerable teaching loads and lack of research support for TYC faculty make it difficult for TYC faculty to independently enact PER. Faculty outside of TYCs can build successful, productive, and equitable research partnerships with TYC faculty to alleviate these constraints. In this paper, we review TYC demographics that distinguish those students from populations traditionally studied in PER. We describe the challenges faced by TYC faculty in performing research as well as examples of successful research and scholarship of teaching and learning. Finally, we outline some successful TYC/PER partnerships and share initial recommendations that can inform TYC and four-year college faculty desiring to build effective and equitable PER partnerships. 

The Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL) has been used to measure the development of students’ physics quantitative literacy in calculus-based introductory physics courses. Despite its effectiveness, issues persist regarding time constraints and potential memorization of items. We propose to split the PIQL into two shorter but statistically equivalent exams (PIQLets) in order to avoid these problems. Using a data set collected with the full PIQL, we created 480 theoretical PIQLet pairs containing different combinations of items. We provide evidence for the similarity of PIQLet pairs by calculating score differences, and comparing the distribution of item parameters calculated using item response theory. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach for defining an equivalent pair of PIQLets using a limited data set from a single university. Additional analyses using a broader and more diverse data set will be required for more broadly applicable results. 

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.