Bridging Intent and Impact: Understanding How Activity Design Shapes the Development of Affective Outcomes in a Computationally Integrated Physics Course

Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education should include computation as part of a physics student’s training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. Including computation changes the traditional modality of physics instruction, so there may well be room for students in computationally integrated physics courses to redefine both what it means to do physics and how they perceive themselves relative to the field. However, most research on this teaching modality has centered on cognitive impacts rather than affective impacts, so little is known about the affective outcomes of holistically integrating computation into physics courses and whether they are positive for students. Further, actions taken by instructors with the express intent of ensuring these positive affective outcomes still may not actualize such results. To understand what makes encounters with computation affirming for students requires detailed attention to fine-grained experiences in ways that distinguish intent behind design from the varied ways in which students are impacted as a result of their engagement. This dissertation aims to address this need in the form of two comparative case studies. These two case studies are set in the same context: a sophomore-level computationally integrated modern physics lab course. This course regularly used computation to conduct statistical analyses to report on the findings of laboratory experiments. Near the end of the semester, the course professor introduced a multi-day activity designed to extend beyond the analytic techniques students had used thus far, thereby providing a more realistic foray into real-world physics. I use this activity as a site to investigate differences between intent and impact, specifically focusing on affective outcomes pertaining to self-perception: physics computational literacy and physics identity. To deeply understand the complex development of affect, I collected data in the form of course observations, document analysis, and interviews with the professor of and students in the course. Methodologically, I aim to center affect, both as a process and as an outcome, so each of these case studies proposes a new modification of the analytic method of conjecture mapping that helps tie affect to design. In the first study, I explore differences between intent and impact of activity design by studying the perspectives of the course professor and of a student who found the activity to be incoherent with her conceptualization of the course as a whole. To understand the role that design played in the formation of this unintended affective stance, I propose a modification of conjecture mapping that explicates how a student enacts the professor’s expectations. First, I create a conjecture map for the instructor’s perspective, as she controlled the design of the activity and established standards for engagement. Specifically, I trace out design conjectures – which clarify how students are expected to engage with the activity design – and process conjectures – which clarify how students are to reach outcomes, in this case affective outcomes, from specific modes of engagement. I highlight a theme for each design and process conjecture, which I then study through the student perspective. I use the same structure for the student’s conjecture map, only varying the connections of design and process conjectures. In doing so, I highlight both the methodological suitability of conjecture mapping for distinguishing intent from impact and the specific misalignments that led to different affective outcomes than intended. This analysis revealed that the student’s practical and formal epistemologies stood in conflict, and her inability to resolve the two stemmed from a framing of the activity that fostered a negative self-perception. Then, in the second study, I explore differences in student perspectives. Specifically, I study two students’ experiences with the same multi-day activity to understand how and why they came to affectively divergent self-perceptions. I propose a modified use of conjecture mapping to visualize the production of affective outcomes and connect narrative analysis to activity design. In this use, I first write a narrative connecting the triangulated data related to this experience. Then, I create original conjecture maps to represent each narrative in a way that helps connect students’ affective experiences to their perceptions of the activity’s design. This use differently relies on design and process conjectures, in which a design conjecture now represents what students do and a process conjecture, how students feel about themselves as a result of their engagement. This analysis highlights how different interpretations of and engagement with activity design reflect students’ epistemic framing of code, which, in turn, drives engagement with scaffolding in manners that shape self-perception. Bringing the papers together reveals that even if an instructor intentionally de-centers the importance of pure coding skills, students can internalize it as a precursor for success. The ramifications of this can be compounded, as students’ affective stance towards their own performance/competence can serve as a catalyst for other affirming or isolating encounters in ways that shape their attitudes towards the relationship between physics and computation. In sum, this dissertation draws attention to the potential for engagement with activities in computationally integrated physics courses to shape the extent to which students see themselves as physicists, further complicating what it means to develop a physics identity.

Author dc:creator

• McHale, Sarah Rosenberg

• affect
• computation
• conjecture mapping
• design
• physics education

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/11299/281792

OAI record oai:identifier

https://conservancy.umn.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Aconservancy.umn.edu%3A11299%2F281792