Author(s):
Need: Though approaches for positively impacting students’ epistemology, growth mindset, and sense of belonging have been developed, these approaches often consider one belief in isolation, providing little insight into how these beliefs and their development may be related. Additionally, classroom efforts to impact these beliefs may not be well-aligned with all elements of course environments, and there are potential clashes between teacher messaging and course structure messaging (e.g., from activities, assessments, and course policies). This 3-year project will iteratively re-design the course structures of an introductory physics course (PHYS100 at the University of Illinois) to promote positive development of these educationally-relevant beliefs. Guiding Question: A design-based research approach will be taken, centered on three Nexus Practices: (i) valuing learning over time, (ii) talking about wrong ideas to learn physics, and (iii) collaboration. Through the design-based research process, this project will produce design principles for how to align course components to coherently foster favorable physics beliefs – in contrast to a more modular, à la carte philosophy of course reforms. Pre-post surveys will measure the impact of this course design on student belief change. Classroom observations and student self-report measures will seek to locate the processes linking the design components with belief development. Altogether, these measures will inform the instructional design of this project and the extraction of more general instructional design principles for belief development.Outcomes:Initial findings include the pre-post survey impacts of the year 1 implementation. Additionally, student interviews have revealed how students relate collaborative experiences to their belief development and, reciprocally, how students’ beliefs impact their construal of collaborative experiences. Broader impacts:Although the resulting course design will be specific to our educational context, broader design principles for fostering some combination of epistemological beliefs, growth mindset, and sense of belonging in undergraduate STEM courses will be developed. Locally, established mechanisms to disseminate findings from PHYS100 to other physics and engineering courses at the University of Illinois will allow these design principles to spread to different pockets of the same macro institutional context, accelerating wider adaptation and adoption. Because students’ beliefs often indicate inequitable conditions or outcomes of undergraduate STEM courses, improving courses as planned in this project may contribute to the development of more equitable and inclusive course environments.
Coauthors
Sarat Lewsirirat, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL; Ellen Ouellette, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL; Vidushi Adlakha, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL; Stina Krist, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL; Morten Lundsgaard, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL
