Attending to students' motivation to adopt computation as a physics practice is essential in effectively integrating computation into physics education. Within the Communities of Practice (COP) framework, addressing this motivational need involves inducting students into the community's sense of joint enterprise, which includes physicists' motivating reasons for adopting computational practices. We used the COP framework to interview students and instructors in the semester after they completed a set of computationally integrated upper division physics courses. This timing allowed us to assess students' perceptions of computation after they were no longer required to engage in computation in their coursework. This article discusses the reasons for using computation in physics identified by these students and instructors. We find that the students saw computation as a normative physics practice, and that they identified reasons for using computation that are consistent with those held by their instructors and the broader physics community. However, we also observe differences in the ways that these instructors and students articulated these reasons: The instructors drew on their research experience with computation, while the students drew on experience from coursework; each student tended to focus their overall discussion on a smaller subset of reasons than the instructors did; and students tended to discuss reasons in isolation, while instructors tended to interweave multiple reasons. We interpret these differences based on the students' positions and trajectories within the physics community.
Undergraduate physics education has greatly benefited from the introduction of computational activities. However, despite the benefits computation has delivered, we still lack a complete understanding of the computationally integrated learning experience from the student perspective. In particular, we are interested in investigating how students develop expert-like perceptions of computation as a practice within the professional physics community. To investigate this aspect of student development, we employ the Communities of Practice framework, which describes how students navigate through a professional community by appropriating the community's practices and goals as personally important. We introduce the construct of a COP-Model as a student's internal representation of a professional community that they develop as they navigate that community. We used this construct to formulate a set of research questions and semistructured interview protocols to explore how five physics students represent the use of computation in their mental models of the global physics community. We foreground these representations in the local academic community established by their instructors in three concurrent computationally integrated physics courses. We find that these students saw computation as a normal and valuable part of physics practice, identified benefits of using computation in alignment with the physics community, struggle with confidence with regards to computation, and demonstrate some expectations for computational proficiency that are misaligned with the physics community. We establish these themes with interview excerpts and discuss implications for instruction and future research.
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