Amy D. Robertson

Energy Tracking Diagrams.

Energy is a crosscutting concept in science and features prominently in national science education documents. In the Next Generation Science Standards, the primary conceptual learning goal is for learners to conserve energy as they track the transfers and transformations of energy within, into, or out of the system of interest in complex physical processes. As part of tracking energy transfers among objects, learners should (i) distinguish energy from matter, including recognizing that energy flow does not uniformly align with the movement of matter, and should (ii) identify specific mechanisms by which energy is transferred among objects, such as mechanical work and thermal conduction. As part of tracking energy transformations within objects, learners should (iii) associate specific forms with specific models and indicators (e.g., kinetic energy with speed and/or coordinated motion of molecules, thermal energy with random molecular motion and/or temperature) and (iv) identify specific mechanisms by whic...

University student and K-12 teacher reasoning about the basic tenets of kinetic-molecular theory, Part I: Volume of an ideal gas

This article reports on a long-term investigation of student and teacher reasoning about the basic tenets of kinetic-molecular theory as they relate to the concept of volume. This research grew out of the finding that university-level students and practicing K-12 teachers often treat the volume of a gas as different from that of its enclosing container. We examined the extent to which this tendency might be associated with incorrect reasoning about the motions of the particles in the gas. The results suggest that teachers and students often justify incorrect answers about the volume of a gas with incorrect statements about the motion of gas particles.

Unveiling Privilege to Broaden Participation

The underrepresentation of women and people of color in physics has been attributed to a wide variety of factors ranging from society-wide conditions such as income inequality and sparse role models, to daily interpersonal interactions that disadvantage or discourage women and people of color from pursuing physics. These factors may be seen as manifestations of White and/or male privilege: social, economic, educational, or political advantages that are made available to Whites and males on the basis of their social identity. White male privilege pervades the discipline of physics as well as the classrooms in which physics is taught and learned. For example, physics is portrayed in textbooks as the product of individual great men, independent of all social or political contexts, rather than as being shaped by the culture of the European Enlightenment (among other cultures) or the conditions during specific international conflicts.

Supporting the development of curricular knowledge among novice physics instructors

In this paper, my aim is to problematize the invisibility (to instructors) of the purposes of particular exercises within research-based instructional materials (RBIMs) and to provide one possible solution to this problem that other teacher educators may adapt for their institutional contexts. In particular, I show that many RBIMs anticipate and respond to particular (often incorrect) learner ideas, that teachers often do not recognize this, and that not recognizing this can cause teachers to miss opportunities to build on learner ideas and/or engage students in scientific practices. I share an instructional activity I designed that is meant to support teachers—including university physics Learning Assistants—in recognizing the purposes of particular questions or sequences of questions within RBIMs, and I illustrate that this activity can be a productive starting place for conversation about RBIMs.

University Student Conceptual Resources for Understanding Forces

We present preliminary results from our investigation of introductory physics students’ conceptual resources for understanding forces. We analyzed a total of 1057 student responses to conceptual questions about forces and identified three common, prevalent resources that students used in justifying their answers, including the ideas that forces change the motion of objects, objects that have motion keep that motion, and motion is due to an imbalance of forces. We illustrate some of the ways in which these resources manifested in student responses and discuss how these ideas are continuous with physics understandings. We situate our work in the literature on student thinking about forces and instructor pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).

Student conceptual resources for understanding mechanical wave propagation

Here we present preliminary results of our investigation of introductory physics students’ conceptual resources for understanding mechanical wave propagation. We analyzed a total of 446 student responses to a conceptual question about pulse propagation and identified two common, prevalent resources: (1) students treat pulses as macroscopic objects moving through a medium whose properties affect their speed, and (2) students treat pulses as propagating local disturbances. We illustrate some of the ways in which these resources manifested in student responses and discuss how we see such ideas as continuous with scientific understanding.

“All Students Are Brilliant”: A Confession of Injustice and a Call to Action

The two of us (AR and LAE), in our teaching, research, and work with teachers, advocate for responsive teaching—an approach that seeks out and builds on the productive “seeds of science” in what our students say and do and assumes that “all students…are brilliant.” This pedagogical approach requires a commitment to listening to and intellectually empathizing with students’ scientific ideas.

University student reasoning about the basic tenets of kinetic-molecular theory, Part II: Pressure of an ideal gas

We report the common justifications that university physics and chemistry students use to reason about changes in the pressure of an ideal gas from a microscopic perspective, based on our analysis of written responses from more than one thousand students. We find that these justifications vary in the extent to which they are (a) mechanistic and (b) consistent with kinetic-molecular theory. We propose that these ideas could serve as the basis for instruction and curriculum development that attends to student thinking.

Exploring the Role of Content Knowledge in Responsive Teaching

In this paper, we begin to explore the role of content knowledge in responsive teaching (RT), using in situ data to draw out and speak to a latent disagreement within the literature. We claim that one role that content knowledge plays in RT is to support teachers in eliciting, seeing, and then pursuing disciplinary connections within their students’ thinking. We suggest an approach to teacher education that draws on the historical wisdom of the physics education research community, in which teachers develop content knowledge and then practice using that knowledge to listen and respond to student thinking.