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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities transitioned in-person instruction to a new modality we refer to as 'emergency remote teaching' (ERT). As many instructors may be facing this same format in future semesters, and in response to future emergency events, it is important to understand the student experience with ERT in order to inform recommendations and best practices that can be used to improve instruction. In this manuscript, we report on preliminary findings from a survey administered to physics students at a large research institution to gain both qualitative and quantitative feedback on what approaches to ERT are being used as well as which were perceived as most effective at supporting student learning. Here, we present four initial themes relating to: interactivity and student motivation; lecture format; exam format; and new challenges experienced by students as a result of ERT. These findings have significant implications for instructors with respect to optimizing ERT.

As a first step in a larger study of student reasoning in upper-division thermal physics, we conducted thinkaloud interviews with 8 physics graduate students to probe their understanding of entropy. In this paper, we'll discuss results from a question which presented students with a novel system-a string in a bath of water-and asked students to rank the probabilities of particular arrangements of the string, define macrostates of the system, and discuss specifically what is meant by the entropy of the system. Exploring graduate students' understanding of entropy and their ability to solve problems and reason with entropic arguments will provide insights into how physicists develop a mature understanding of entropy as a physical quantity. We find a tendency for graduate students to project properties of macrostates onto constituent microstates, and discuss other observations. We identify connections to previous research and lay out the next steps for this project.

Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and problem solving. Students might generate diagrams to orient themselves to a scenario, to organize information to aid in solving a problem, or as a tool of communication to demonstrate their understanding of a physical scenario. By asking 19 undergraduate and graduate physics majors to solve a number of multiple-choice physics problems-with no prompting regarding diagrams-and then explicitly asking them to generate diagrams of similar physical scenarios, we are able to compare which elements of a scenario students externalize on their own as compared to when they are prompted. We found that different physical contexts impact how critical it is to draw an accurate diagrams, and we explore implications for teaching and research.

Significant focus in the PER community has been paid to student reasoning in undergraduate quantum mechanics. However, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted 15 exploratory think-aloud interviews with students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university cross-listed in the physics and computer science departments. Focusing on responses to one particular problem, we identify two notably consistent problem-solving strategies across students in the context of a particular interview prompt, which we term Naive Measurement Probabilities (NMP) and Virtual Quantum Computer (VQC), respectively. Operating from a resources framework, we interpret these strategies as choices of coherent (and potentially mutually-generative) sets of resources to employ and available actions to perform.

Disability is an often-overlooked aspect of diversity. Recent research has indicated that there are barriers to access and participation for disabled students inherent in the design of physics courses. To help counteract these barriers, universities are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled students. However, not all students use the accommodations they have access to because of social factors (e.g., disability stigma), and others do not have access to the professional diagnosis often required to access accommodations. The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of students who identify with a disability/impairment who were taking an emergency remote teaching (ERT) physics course in Fall 2020 to inform policies about providing access to students in future remote and face-to-face courses. In this paper, we present the prevalence and types of impairments disabled students in physics courses reported, their reported accommodation usage, and ethical considerations of this work. Overall, we find that disabled students represent a sizeable group in physics courses, and there are positive and negative reasons students did not use or request accommodations.

Though several conceptual inventories have been developed for thermal physics, none target upperdivision material and all focus specifically on thermodynamics without including statistical mechanics content. In this paper, we outline the development process of an upper-division thermal physics assessment that captures both thermodynamics and statistical mechanics content. To ensure that the assessment can be broadly usable, as a first step in this process, we administered a survey to physics faculty to determine the scope and content variability of thermal physics courses across institutions. We received over 70 responses from 63 unique institutions, approximately half of which are minority-serving institutions and women's colleges. Our findings support the claim that there is significant variation in the content covered at different institutions, but also some general agreement on a number of core content areas. We identified 10 key topics which were listed by the majority (95%) of survey respondents to focus on for the assessment development process. We then wrote assessment objectives that encompass core content goals within these 10 topics, which guided the writing of free-response assessment items that were piloted with students. Using student responses to the free-response items, we developed multiple-response versions, which includes both multiple-choice and coupled, multiple-response items. In this paper, we present details of the faculty survey, including methods of developing and distributing the survey to solicit a broad range of perspectives. Additionally, we present results of the survey, including core content covered by faculty in upper-division thermal physics courses, and discuss how these results were used to guide development of assessment objectives and assessment items. We include the full development process of one assessment item as an example.

The divergence theorem is an important mathematical tool used in many areas of physics, most notably, electricity and magnetism. Students have nominally encountered the divergence theorem in their math courses; however, its application in physics often differs meaningfully from its application in a pure math context. In this paper, we investigate physics students' understanding and interpretation of the divergence theorem through written responses to a brief two-part prompt which was designed to elicit separate responses for students' literal and qualitative interpretations of the divergence theorem. This differentiated between understanding the mathematical statement and being able to interpret its fundamental meaning. We found that students provided moderately successful literal interpretations but provided fewer meaningful qualitative interpretations. We also found that the ability to accurately translate the mathematical statement of the divergence theorem appeared to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition for being able to provide a meaningful interpretation.