Meetings & Archive

Introductory physics is often experienced as abstract and disconnected from students’ everyday lives, limiting engagement and sensemaking. This talk explores how leveraging students’ cultural resources through contextualized assessment tasks can support disciplinary learning in university physics.

Drawing on a pilot study across multiple institutions (R1, PUI, and HBCU), students engaged with context-rich tasks that connected core physics ideas (motion, energy, electricity) to their lived experiences through both storytelling and traditional problem solving. Findings show that students frequently used every day analogies and personal narratives to reason physics concepts while still demonstrating partial to strong scientific reasoning. Student reflections further indicate that contextualized problems increased engagement, relevance, and visualization.

The talk argues that leveraging cultural resources enhances, rather than diminishes, rigor by supporting deeper connections between everyday and disciplinary knowledge, and discusses implications for assessment design and broadening participation in physics.

This study explores the development and application of regulatory skills and teamwork dynamics among 116 undergraduate students participating in scaffolded computational modeling and simulation projects. Organized into 24 teams, students navigated complex thermodynamics problems that required not only technical proficiency but also the ability to self-monitor learning gaps and apply cognition regulation to overcome collaborative hurdles. Through a qualitative analysis of individual reflections and team retrospectives, the research identifies three primary domains where regulatory skills were enacted: programming, meaning-making, and process management.

Results highlight that teams frequently faced teamwork-specific challenges, such as clashing work schedules, poor communication, and difficulties in the division of labor. To mitigate these issues, students employed co-regulation strategies, including the use of asynchronous collaboration in Google Colab, the establishment of internal deadlines, and the assignment of specific team roles. The study concludes that high-performing teams demonstrated a more robust engagement with these regulatory processes, identifying more challenges and implementing a wider variety of strategies than lower-performing teams. These findings suggest that teamwork and project management skills do not develop automatically; rather, they must be explicitly scaffolded and integrated into STEM curricula to help students manage the social and cognitive complexities of collaborative computational work.