Physics
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2269
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Item Developing Methods and Theories for Modeling Student Leadership and Students' Experiences of Academic Support(2024) Dalka, Robert Paul; Turpen, Chandra; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation brings together two research strands that study: (a) the ways in which physics and STEM students contribute to growing capacity for institutional change within collaborative teams and (b) the support structures of graduate programs through an innovative methodology grounded in network science. The first research strand is explored within two different team environments, one of a student-centric interinstitutional team and a second of departmental change teams. Across both of these contexts, I identify how by engaging in an interaction-based agency, students are able to jointly define their own roles and the projects they pursue. In comparing across these contexts, we identify how students navigate different leadership structures and how this can support or limit student contributions in these teams. A central contribution of this work is a model for cultivating capacity for change through shared leadership and relational agency. This model captures how capacity can be built in different domains tied to the activity systems of the work. We show how this model can help practitioners and facilitators better partner with students as well as how researchers can use this model to capture how students contribute to the work of the team. The second research strand focuses on developing and applying an innovative methodology for network analysis of Likert-style surveys. This methodology generates a meaningful network based on survey item response similarity. I show how researchers can use modular analysis of the network to identify larger themes built from the connections of particular aspects. Additionally, I apply this methodology to provide a unique interpretation of responses to the Aspects of Student Experience Scale instrument for well-defined demographic groups to show how thematic clusters identified in the full data set re-emerge or change for different groups of respondents. These results are important for practitioners who seek to make targeted changes to their physics graduate programs in hopes of seeing particular benefits for particular groups. This dissertation opens up lines for future work within both strands. The model for building capacity for change draws attention to the mediating processes that emerge on a team and in students’ interactions with others. This model can be developed further to include additional constructs and leadership structures, as well as explore the relevance to other academic contexts. For quantitative researchers, the network analysis for Likert-style surveys methodology is widely applicable and provides a new way to investigate the wide range of phenomena assessed by Likert-style surveys.Item STUDENT SENSE-MAKING IN QUANTUM MECHANICS: LESSONS TO TEACHERS FROM STUDIES OF GROUP-WORK AND REPRESENTATION USE(2018) Sohr, Erin Ronayne; Elby, Andrew; Gupta, Ayush; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation covers two distinct threads of research; both threads focus on understanding student-thinking in quantum mechanics and then draw implications for future research and instruction. The primary goal of this collection of work is, in any way possible, to improve instruction and find ways to better support students in their learning. The first thread of research focuses on tension negotiation in collaborative group problem-solving. While group-work has become more commonplace in physics classes, this research provides instructors some means of seeing just how complicated group dynamics can be. In particular, I highlight one interactional pattern through which students resolve tension emerging in group interaction by closing conversations or conversational topics. In doing so, students leave some conceptual line of reasoning unresolved. This work provides important insights into helping instructors understand and respond to group dynamics and conversational closings. The second thread of work focuses on flexible representation use. This thread has two similar lines of research. The first focuses on how particular representations (wavefunction and external potential graphs) associated with the infinite-well and finite-well potentials can be used by students as tools to learn with. Adapting these models to new situations can lead to deeper understandings of both the model being adapted and the new situation. In some cases, the process of adaptation is not impeded by the student lacking a sophisticated understanding of the model being adapted. The second line of research on representation use focuses on the reflexiveness of student inquiry with representations. In reflexive reasoning, the student’s sense-making shapes, and is shaped by, the representations they draw and animate. This form of inquiry stands in contrast with traditional notions of proficiency in using representations which tend to highlight reproducing standard representational forms and then reading-out information from those forms. In this work, I highlight how this non-linear, reflexive sense-making is supported by the development of coherent, coupled systems of representations and attention to particular figural features, leading to the generation of new meaning.