In the process of reforming physics education over the last several decades, a tension has developed between engaging students with the content in more conceptually challenging ways and helping them identify with physics so they are personally motivated in their learning. Through comparative case studies of four high school physics teachers, we used a teacher positioning lens to understand an emergent theme around differences in students' level of engagement, including behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement, and physics identity development. In each classroom, data were collected over the course of one week by two observers in multiple formats, including student and teacher interviews and surveys, video recordings, and field notes. We used a constant comparative approach with the qualitative data and regression with the quantitative data to compare across the four teachers. Our findings suggest that teachers' physical, structural, contextual, and social cues may influence the extent to which students engage with their physics class. The teachers' social cues appeared to be the most important for affective and cognitive engagement, and subsequently physics identity development. Contextual cues were less prominent, which may indicate the difficulty in making physics content contextually meaningful for students. Finally, physical/structural cues appeared to be important for behavioral engagement but this engagement was not sufficient for physics identity development. In sum, the way that physics teachers position themselves can moderate students' level and type of engagement with the class and ultimately their physics identity development. # 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52: 2015
Heather entered the Applied Social and Community Psychology program in the fall of 2014, after completing her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Cincinnati. She has participated in various research projects examining the interaction between stereotypes and science interest and confidence, their influence upon womens' performance in school and the workplace, and their presence in the media and consequences for viewers. Her primary research interest is science identity, STEM education, and participation in online communities.
Background: The retention of traditionally underserved students remains a pressing problem across graduate engineering programs. Disciplinary differences in graduate engineering identity provide a lens to investigate students' experiences and can pinpoint potential opportunity structures that support or hinder progress based on social and personal identities. Purpose: This study investigates the impact of discipline, gender, race/ ethnicity, advisor relationship, and years in a program on graduate engineering identity variability.Methods: Cross-sectional survey data from a national sample of doctoral engineering students were analyzed with multilevel modeling. Multilevel modeling measured the differences at the individual and discipline levels for graduate engineering identity and the domains of engineer, researcher, and scientist. Independent variables included were gender, advisor relationship score, race/ethnicity, and years in a program. Results: The engineer identity sub-construct of recognition significantly varied among engineering disciplines. Traditionally underserved students (i.e., Women and minoritized racial/ethnic groups) expressed lower engineering recognition levels, with this relationship varying based on discipline.Overall, our model explained 30% of the variation in engineering recognition among disciplines. Conclusions:The disciplinary variation in graduate engineering identity combined with the significance of gender and race/ethnicity indicates traditionally underserved students do not experience equivalent opportunity structures compared with their well-represented peers. Modifying traditional opportunity structures to serve students better may provide the needed changes to engage and retain traditionally underserved populations.
In the February 2017 issue of The Physics Teacher, an article was presented that highlighted the importance of high school physics teachers in inspiring women in physics, particularly by recognizing them as being a “physics person.” Drawing on data from over 900 female undergraduates in physics, the article showed that the largest fraction became interested in physics careers during high school. In particular, being recognized by their physics teacher substantially increased the odds of their planning physics careers by the beginning of college. Since this article was published, questions have been directed toward us from physics teachers regarding the nature of recognition, e.g., how do we recognize a student meaningfully and what does recognition look like in the classroom? For example, one teacher wrote saying: I specifically wanted to tell you how much I appreciated this: …your closing note that not all recognition is meaningful, and that the key is high expectations for all and recognition of when [expectations are] met…I wrote in my margins on the page before, “What does this recognition actually look like?”
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