Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one's existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the…

This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different institutions over a year and a half using three semistructured interviews each. The data enabled the…

Limiting case analysis (LCA) is important to practicing physicists. Yet, there is little concrete guidance for physics educators, and a lack of consensus in the research community about how to help students learn, and learn from, limiting case analysis. In this study, we first review existing literature to find commonalities and variations in how…

Multicultural education invites teachers to support students in critiquing the foundations of a given discipline, with the aim of reimagining that discipline and the purposes it serves. In this paper, we present a series of cases in which high school physics teachers who are enrolled in a summer professional development course expressed vexation…

Underrepresentation of women in physics is a prominent issue in the western countries. Since physics teachers are in a unique position to affect new generations of students, it has been suggested that they are an important part of the solution. In this paper, we explore how trainee physics teachers create spaces for themselves as learners of…

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…

There is growing awareness that established structures of higher education are often predicated on problematic assumptions about merit, excellence, and rigor. Doctoral qualifying exams, for example, are required to advance to candidacy in many Ph.D. programs despite decades of documented concerns about the implications of standard modes for…

There is growing interest in implementing reform-based lab courses in undergraduate physics that are student driven rather than instructor driven. In these courses, students develop and carry out experiments while simultaneously reasoning about their hypotheses, data collection procedures, collected evidence, and the relevant physics content.…

We analyze the identity trajectory of a single case study, Cassidy, within the physics community. We focus our analysis on two settings in the physics community: an undergraduate research experience, and undergraduate coursework. We use video data from three interviews (spanning roughly fifteen months) to longitudinally analyze shifts in…

Resources theory assumes that resource activation is context sensitive, and that an important dimension of context is the question students are answering. The context sensitivity of resource activation has been demonstrated empirically by case studies that show students using different resources to answer questions that are similar in focus. In…

Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures. In this paper, we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate…

For young women, inbound identity trajectories into physics are generally regarded as exceptional. In this study, we investigated the experiences that young women have which may support their sustained interest and achievement in physics, and their ongoing inbound trajectories into post-secondary physics education. To understand these experiences,…

Engaging in interactions with peers is important for student learning. Many studies have quantified patterns of student interactions in in-person physics courses using social network analysis, finding different network structures between instructional contexts (lecture and laboratory) and styles (active and traditional). Such studies also find…