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This study investigated differences and shifts in learning and motivation constructs among male and female students in a nonmajors, yearlong structured inquiry college physics course and examined how these variables were related to physics understanding and course achievement. Tests and questionnaires measured students' learning approaches, motivational goals, selfefficacy, epistemological beliefs, scientific reasoning abilities, and understanding of central physics concepts at the beginning and end of the course. Course achievement scores were also obtained. The findings showed that male students had significantly higher self-efficacy, performance goals, and physics understanding compared to females, which persisted throughout the course. Differential shifts were found in students' meaningful learning approaches, with females tending to use less meaningful learning from beginning to end of the course; and males using more meaningful learning over this time period. For both males and females, self-efficacy significantly predicted physics understanding and course achievement. For females, higher reasoning ability was also a significant predictor of understanding and achievement; whereas for males, learning goals and rote learning were significant predictors, but in a negative direction. The findings reveal that different variables of learning and motivation may be important for females' success in inquiry physics compared to males. Instructors should be cognizant of those needs in order to best help all students learn and achieve in college physics.

The physics instruction at UC Davis for life science majors takes place in a long-standing reformed large-enrollment physics course in which the discussion or laboratory instructors (primarily graduate student teaching assistants) implement the interactive-engagement (IE) elements of the course. Because so many different instructors participate in disseminating the IE course elements, we find it essential to the instructors' professional development to observe and document the studentinstructor interactions within the classroom. Out of this effort, we have developed a computerized real-time instructor observation tool (RIOT) to take data of student-instructor interactions. We use the RIOT to observe 29 different instructors for 5 hours each over the course of one quarter, for a total of about 150 hours of class time, finding that the range of instructor behaviors is more extreme than previously assumed. In this paper, we introduce RIOT and describe how the variation present across 29 different instructors can provide students in the same course with significantly different course experiences.

This paper describes our large reformed introductory physics course at UC Davis, which bioscience students have been taking since 1996. The central feature of this course is a focus on sense-making by the students during the 5 h per week discussion/labs in which the students take part in activities emphasizing peer-peer discussions, argumentation, and presentations of ideas. The course differs in many fundamental ways from traditionally taught introductory physics courses. After discussing the unique features of CLASP and its implementation at UC Davis, various student outcome measures are presented that show increased performance by students who took the CLASP course compared to students who took a traditionally taught introductory physics course. Measures we use include upper-division GPAs, MCAT scores, FCI gains, and MPEX-II scores.

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