We report some of the common, prevalent conceptual resources that students used to reason about energy, based on our analysis of written responses to questions given to 807 introductory physics students. These resources include, for example, associating forms of energy with indicators, relating forces and energy, and representing energy quantitatively. This research responds to a need for large-scale, resourcesoriented research on students' conceptual understanding and has the potential to support the development of an underexplored dimension of pedagogical content knowledge-knowledge of student resources for understanding energy. Our aim is to promote instructor take-up of the resources theory of knowledge, and we suggest a number of ways in which instructors might capitalize on the resources we report.
at Boulder specializing in Physics Education Research. Chandra's work involves designing and researching contexts for learning within higher education. In her research, Chandra draws from the perspectives of anthropology, cultural psychology, and the learning sciences. Through in-situ studies of classroom and institutional practice, Chandra focuses on the role of culture in science learning and educational change. Chandra pursues projects that have high potential for leveraging sustainable change in undergraduate STEM programs and makes these struggles for change a direct focus of her research efforts.
in the Physics Education Research (PER) Group. Turpen's work involves designing and researching contexts for learning within higher education (for both students and faculty). Her research draws from perspectives in anthropology, cultural psychology, and the learning sciences. Through in-situ studies of classroom practice and institutional practice, she focuses on the role of culture and ideology in science learning and educational change. She pursues projects that have high potential for leveraging equitable change in undergraduate STEM programs and she makes these struggles for change a direct focus of her research efforts. She also serves on several national leadership bodies: the Physics Education Research Leadership Organizing Council (PERLOC),
Learning Assistants (LAs) are peer-educators in undergraduate courses who take a pedagogy seminar concurrently with teaching. In our Learning Assistant pedagogy course, we engaged LAs in roleplaying interactions between a quiet student, an overbearing student, and an LA. Afterwards, the whole class discussed the roleplay activity. Drawing on tools from discourse analysis, we attend to how roleplay actors navigate speech, turns-of-talk, and physical orientation. We show that the LA playing the role of the overbearing student, drawing on his emotionally-charged embodied experience in the roleplay, articulated insights about how the coupling of linguistic, metalinguistic, and emotional qualities in those interactions affected the power dynamics and emotions embedded in interactions.
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