Students' sense of belonging impacts their affect, motivation, well-being, and academic success. Sense of belonging is considered context-dependent as what determines one's belonging differs across contexts. This study explores how sense of belonging manifests among post-secondary, introductory chemistry students. This context is important given…

Using Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) and reflexive Thematic Analysis (TA) methods, the purpose of this case study was to construct theory about equity for students studying chemistry at public universities in Colorado. Interviews with students (N=12), chemistry instructors (N=9), and equity practitioners (N=9) as well as observations of…

Currently there are no assessment instruments available for upper-division thermal physics, though several introductory assessments are currently available. Notably missing from these introductory assessment are items targeting statistical mechanics. This leaves a gap in the content that can be assessed by upper-division thermal physics faculty.…

Hundreds of articles have explored the extent to which individuals accept evolution, and the Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) is the most often used survey. However, research indicates the MATE has limitations, and it has not been updated since its creation more than 20 years ago. In this study, we revised the MATE using…

Research on the test structure of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has largely ignored gender, and research on FCI gender effects (often reported as "gender gaps") has seldom interrogated the structure of the test. These rarely crossed streams of research leave open the possibility that the FCI may not be structurally valid across…

Research-based assessment instruments (RBAIs) are ubiquitous throughout both physics instruction and physics education research. The vast majority of analyses involving student responses to RBAI questions have focused on whether or not a student selects correct answers and using correctness to measure growth. This approach often undervalues the…

Causal reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process that supports a wide range of learning activities such as making predictions and inferences, explaining phenomena, and drawing conclusions. In physics learning, causal reasoning plays an important role in developing conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills. This study builds off the…

Student learning in instructional physics labs represents a growing area of research that includes investigations of students' beliefs and expectations about the nature of experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies about experimental physics and support broader lab transformation efforts at the University of Colorado Boulder…

Finding better ways to implement effective teaching and learning strategies in higher education is urgently needed to help address student outcomes such as retention rates, graduation rates, and learning. Psychologists contribute to the science and art of teaching and learning in higher education under many flags, including cognitive psychology,…

This study aims to investigate the test scores of the three-tier diagnostic chemistry test (TDCT)[three-tier diagnostic tests] and multiple choice chemistry test (MCCT) by response change behaviour (RCB). The study is a descriptive research study aiming to investigate the item response efforts of TDCT[three-tier diagnostic tests] and MCCT in a…

The American Physical Society calls on its members to improve the diversity of physics by supporting an inclusive culture that encourages women and Black, Indigenous, and people of color to become physicists. In the current educational system, it is unlikely for a student to become a physicist if they do not share the same attitudes about what it…

In physics education research (PER), concept inventories (CIs) have become standard instruments for assessing students' learning throughout instruction. To promote widespread use of concept inventories, previous studies have developed an approach to split a full length CI into short versions of CIs. This research extends the existing method to…

Student views of force and motion reflect the personal experiences and physics education of the student. With a different language, culture, and educational system, we expect that Japanese students' views on force and motion might be different from those of American students. The Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) is an instrument used…

Evolutionary theory is central to the biological sciences, and to critical aspects of everyday life, and yet a significant proportion of Americans reject evolution. Our study sets out to examine the role of a second year college general education course in affecting students' acceptance of evolution. We report three years of data using the Measure…

An ontological causal relation is a quantified relation between certain interactions and changes in corresponding properties. Key ideas in physics, such as Newton's second law and the first law of thermodynamics, are representative examples of these relations. In connection with the teaching and learning of these relations, this study investigated…