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The importance of science beliefs such as self-efficacy, interest, identity, sense of belonging, perceived recognition and effectiveness of peer interaction in science education has been increasingly recognized in recent years. Here, we use five years of data from a validated survey administered to non-majors during their first year, physics majors throughout their undergraduate education, and first-year physics Ph.D. students at a large research university in the US. We find that physics majors in the first-year responded to the survey prompts more positively than their non-physics major peers who were in the same introductory courses, with the largest differences in perceived recognition, interest, and physics identity and somewhat smaller differences in self-efficacy, perception of peer interaction, and sense of belonging. Further, the average survey responses of physics majors for each belief remain largely constant over time from their first-year of the undergraduate curriculum through the last year and comparable to the Ph.D. students. This suggests that students are adjusting their interpretation of the survey items to match the current level of expertise expected of them. One exception occurs in the second year, when peer interaction and sense of belonging reach a minimum. Moreover, physics identity dips to the lowest value in the fourth year when many students are contemplating continuing in physics beyond their undergraduate years or switching fields. We also find that perceived recognition is the best predictor of physics identity for physics majors throughout their entire physics education, pointing to the importance of instructors making a concerted effort to recognize and affirm their students throughout their education., Comment: Res Sci Educ (2022)

Underrepresented minority (URM) students are subjected to historically rooted inequities when pursuing an education, especially in STEM disciplines with little diversity. In order to make STEM educ...

In two earlier studies, we developed a new method to measure students’ ability to transfer physics problem-solving skills to new contexts using a sequence of online learning modules, and implemented two interventions in the form of additional learning modules designed to improve transfer ability. The current paper introduces a new data analysis scheme that could improve the accuracy of the measurement by accounting for possible differences in students’ goal orientation and behavior, as well as revealing the possible mechanism by which one of the two interventions improves transfer ability. Based on a 2×2 framework of self-regulated learning, students with a performance-avoidance oriented goal are more likely to guess on some of the assessment attempts in order to save time, resulting in an underestimation of the student populations’ transfer ability. The current analysis shows that about half of the students had frequent brief initial assessment attempts, and significantly lower correct rates on certain modules, which we think is likely to have originated at least in part from students adopting a performance-avoidance strategy. We then divided the remaining population, for which we can be certain that few students adopted a performance-avoidance strategy, based on whether they interacted with one of the intervention modules designed to develop basic problem-solving skills, or passed that module on their first attempt without interacting with the instructional material. By comparing to propensity score matched populations from a previous semester, we found that the improvement in subsequent transfer performance observed in a previous study mainly came from the latter population, suggesting that the intervention served as an effective reminder for students to activate existing skills, but fell short of developing those skills among those who have yet to master it.

In this study, we adapt prior identity framework to investigate the effect of learning environment (including perceived recognition, peer interaction and sense of belonging) on students' physics self-efficacy, interest and identity by controlling for their self-efficacy and interest at the beginning of a calculus-based introductory physics course. We surveyed 1203 students, 35% of whom were women. We found that female students' physics self-efficacy and interest were lower than male students' at the beginning of the course, and the gender gaps in these motivational constructs became even larger by the end of the course. Analysis revealed that the decrease in students' physics self-efficacy and interest were mediated by the learning environment and ultimately affected students' physics identity. Our model shows that perceived recognition played a major role in explaining students' physics identity, and students' sense of belonging in physics played an important role in explaining the change in students' physics self-efficacy.

Societal stereotypes and biases pertaining to who belongs in physics and who can excel in physics can impact motivational beliefs, e.g., of women and racial and ethnic minority students in physics courses. This study investigates how the learning environment predicts male and female students' motivational beliefs including physics self-efficacy, interest, and identity at the end of year long (spanning two-semester) algebra-based introductory physics courses. These were courses at a large university in the US taken primarily by biological science majors many of whom are interested in health professions. Although women are not underrepresented in these physics courses, societal stereotypes and biases internalized by female students over their lifetime can still impact their motivational beliefs about physics. Our findings show gender gap in motivational beliefs favoring men. These findings can be useful to provide support and create an equitable and inclusive learning environment to help all students excel in these courses., 7 pages, 2 figures, submitted to PERC

We discuss a study in a first year college introductory physics course for physical science and engineering majors that shows that women, on average, feel less recognized by their physics instructors than men as students who can excel in physics. We also discuss how this lack of perceived positive recognition pertaining to physics can adversely affect their self-efficacy and performance in the course. We recommend that physics instructors not be parsimonious in their praise of students and make a conscious effort to positively recognize their students for their effort and progress whenever an opportunity arises. Interviews with female students suggest that instructors should be careful not to give unintended messages to students, e.g., by praising some students for brilliance or intelligence as opposed to their effort because praising a student for brilliance can convey to other students that they do not have what is required to excel in physics. Interviews also suggest that when students ask instructors for help on physics problems, if instructors inadvertently label those problems as "easy", "trivial" or "obvious", it can also make students feel disparaged. The perception of being belittled by these kinds of unintended comments by instructors as well as a lack of positive recognition for good effort and progress have the potential to most adversely impact students from underrepresented groups including women.

An earlier study using sequences of online learning modules found that a significant fraction of undergraduate students were unable to solve similar new problems after learning from an online problem solving tutorial. The current study examines the effectiveness of two methods to improve students' subsequent problem solving performance. First, an "on-ramp" module designed to help students develop proficiency in relevant basic skills was added prior to the tutorial. We found that students' performance on subsequent modules improved significantly over the previous year, and in one of the two sequences we found evidence to support that the improvement was due to the addition of the on-ramp module rather than other irrelevant factors. Second, a new "transfer" module was added after the tutorial and before the final quiz module in which half of the students were given a compare-contrast task and the other half were asked to answer tutorial-style scaffolding questions. On the subsequent quiz module, we did not find significant performance differences between the two conditions, nor did students' performance significantly improve over the previous year. The study demonstrated that mastery-style online homework can serve as an efficient and flexible method for evaluating the effectiveness of new instructional designs.

Analysis of institutional data for physics majors showing predictive relationships between required mathematics and physics courses in various years is important for contemplating how the courses build on each other and whether there is need to make changes to the curriculum for the majors to strengthen these relationships. We used 15 years of institutional data at a US-based large research university to investigate how introductory physics and mathematics courses predict male and female physics majors’ performance on required advanced physics and mathematics courses. We used structure equation modeling (SEM) to investigate these predictive relationships and find that among introductory and advanced physics and mathematics courses, there are gender differences in performance in favor of male students only in the introductory physics courses after controlling for high school GPA. We found that a measurement invariance fully holds in a multi-group SEM by gender, so it was possible to carry out analysis with gender mediated by introductory physics and high school GPA. Moreover, we find that these introductory physics courses that have gender differences do not predict performance in advanced physics courses. In other words, students could be using invalid data about their introductory physics performance to make their decision about whether physics is the right field for them to pursue, and those invalid data in introductory physics favor male students. Also, introductory mathematics courses predict performance in advanced mathematics courses which in turn predict performance in advanced physics courses. Furthermore, apart from the introductory physics courses that do not predict performance in future physics courses, there is a strong predictive relationship between the sophomore, junior and senior level physics courses.

In quantum field theory, the photon-fermion vertex can be described in terms of four form factors which encode the static electromagnetic properties of the particle, namely its charge, magnetic dipole moment, electric dipole moment, and anapole moment. For Majorana fermions, only the anapole moment can be nonzero, a consequence of the fact that these particles are their own antiparticles. Using the framework of quantum field theory, we perform a scattering calculation which probes the anapole moment with a spinless charged particle. In the limit of low-momentum transfer, we confirm that the anapole can be classically likened to a point-like toroidal solenoid whose magnetic field is confined to the origin. Such a toroidal current distribution can be used to demonstrate the Aharonov-Bohm effect. We find that, in the non-relativistic limit, our scattering cross section agrees with a quantum mechanical computation of the cross section for a spinless current scattered by an infinitesimally thin toroidal solenoid. Our presentation is geared toward advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. This work serves as an introduction to the anapole moment and also provides an example of how one can develop an understanding of a particle's electromagnetic properties in quantum field theory.