Nafis I. Karim’s research while affiliated with University of Pittsburgh and other places

In the past few decades, educators and physics education researchers have been developing and evaluating instructional approaches designed to improve students’ conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills in physics for students with different prior preparation and backgrounds. These instructional approaches often require students to be active participants in their learning, and are often developed through research, which provides evidence for their effectiveness. Hence, we refer to them as “Evidence-Based Active Engagement” (EBAE) strategies.

We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions in electricity and magnetism as revealed by the CSEM. For each item on the CSEM, the TAs were asked to (1) identify the most common incorrect answer choice of introductory physics students and (2) predict the percentage of introductory students who would answer the question correctly in a post-test. Then, we used the CSEM post-test data from approximately 400 introductory physics students (provided in the original paper describing the CSEM) to assess the extent to which the TAs were able to identify the alternate conceptions of introductory students related to electricity and magnetism. In addition, we conducted think-aloud interviews with TAs who had at least two semester of teaching experience in recitations to explore their reasoning about this task. We find that the TAs struggled to think about the difficulty of the questions from introductory students' perspective and they often underestimated the difficulty of the questions. Moreover, the TAs often expected certain incorrect answer choices to be common among introductory students when in fact those answer choices were not common.

Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account common student difficulties in their instructional design. Here, we discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions in electricity and magnetism as revealed by the CSEM. For each item on the CSEM, the TAs were asked to identify the most common incorrect answer choice selected by introductory physics students if they did not know the correct answer after traditional instruction. Then, we used introductory student CSEM post-test data to assess the extent to which TAs were able to identify the most common alternate conception of introductory students in each question on the CSEM. We find that the TAs were thoughtful when attempting to identify common student difficulties and they enjoyed learning about student difficulties this way. However, they struggled to identify many common difficulties of introductory students that persist after traditional instruction. We discuss specific alternate conceptions that persist after traditional instruction, the extent to which TAs were able to identify them, and results from think-aloud interviews with TAs which provided valuable information regarding why the TAs sometimes selected certain alternate conceptions as the most common but were instead very rare among introductory students. We also discuss how tasks such as the one used in this study can be used in professional development programs to engender productive discussions about the importance of being knowledgeable about student alternate conceptions in order to help students learn.

Several prior studies in introductory physics have found a gender gap on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students performing better than female students. Moreover, prior studies in the context of mathematics have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group can lead to deteriorated performance of the stereotyped group. Here, we describe two studies in which we investigated the impact of interventions on the gender gap on the FCI and CSEM in large introductory physics courses at a large research university. In the first study, we investigated whether asking introductory physics students to indicate their gender immediately before taking the CSEM increased the gender gap compared to students who were not asked for this information. We found no difference in performance between male and female students in the two conditions. In the second study, conducted with several thousand introductory physics students, we investigated the prevalence of the belief that men generally perform better in physics than women and the extent to which this belief is correlated with the performance of both female and male students on the FCI and the CSEM in introductory physics courses. We found that at the end of the year-long calculus-based introductory physics sequence, in which female students are significantly underrepresented, agreeing with a gender stereotype was correlated negatively with the performance of female students on the conceptual physics surveys. The fact that female students who agreed with the gender stereotype performed worse than female students who disagreed with it at the end of the year-long calculus-based physics course may partly be due to an increased stereotype threat that female students who agree with the stereotype may experience in this course.

Many prior studies have found a gender gap between male and female students' performance on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students performing better than female students. Prior studies have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group or stereotype threat, e.g., asking test-takers to indicate their ethnicity before taking a test, can lead to deteriorated performance of the stereotyped group. Here, we describe two studies in which we investigated the gender gap on the FCI and CSEM. In the first study, we investigated whether asking students to indicate their gender immediately before taking hte CSEM increased the gender gap compared to students who were not asked for this information. In the second study, conducted with over 1100 introductory physics students, we investigated the prevalence of the belief that men generally perform better in physics than women and the extent to which this belief is correlated with the performance of both the female and male students on the FCI.

We describe the impact of physics education research-based pedagogical techniques in flipped and active-engagement non-flipped courses on student performance on validated conceptual surveys. We compare student performance in courses that make significant use of evidence-based active engagement (EBAE) strategies with courses that primarily use lecture-based (LB) instruction. All courses had large enrollment and often had 100-200 students. The analysis of data for validated conceptual surveys presented here includes data from large numbers of students from two-semester sequences of introductory algebra-based and calculus-based introductory physics courses. The conceptul surveys used to assess student learning in the first and second semester courses were the Force Concept Inventory and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism, respectively. In the research discussed here, the performance of students in EBAE courses at a particular level is compared with LB courses in two situations: (i) the same instructor taught two courses, one of which was a flipped course involving EBAE methods and the other an LB course, while the homework, recitations, and final exams were kept the same; (ii) student perforamnce in all of the EBAE courses taught by different instructors was averaged and compared with LB courses of the same type also averaged over different instructors. In all classes, we find that students in courses that make significant use of active-engagement strategies, on average, outperformed students in courses using primarily LB instruction of the same type on conceptual surveys even though there was no statistically significant difference on the pretest before instruction. We also discuss correlation between the performance on the validated conceptual surveys and the final exam, which typically placed a heavy weight on quantitative problem solving.

Many prior studies have found a gender gap between male and female students’ performance on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM), with male students performing better than female students. Studies in other disciplines have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group, or stereotype threat, for example, asking test-takers to indicate their ethnicity, can lead to poorer performance of the stereotyped group. However, in a previous study, we found that in the context of a standardized conceptual physics assessment, asking introductory physics students to indicate their gender before answering the questions did not affect female or male students’ performance compared to an equivalent group not asked for such information. Here, we investigate differences in male and female students’ performance both on a pre-test (before instruction) and on a post-test (after traditional instruction in relevant concepts) on the CSEM survey in a large-enrollment introductory physics course. In this study students were either provided information that the performance on prior administration of the CSEM survey has been found to be gender neutral or were not told anything about the gender neutrality before taking the CSEM survey. We also report on another study of over 1,100 introductory physics students that investigated the prevalence of the belief that men generally perform better in physics than women and the extent to which this belief was correlated with the performance of both female and male students on the FCI and CSEM before and after instruction.

Several prior studies in introductory physics have found a gender gap, i.e., a difference between male and female students’ performance on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students performing better than female students. Moreover, prior studies in the context of mathematics have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group or stereotype threat, e.g., asking test takers to indicate their ethnicity before taking a test, can lead to deteriorated performance of the stereotyped group. Here, we describe two studies in which we investigated the impact of interventions on the gender gap on the FCI and CSEM in large (more than 100 students) introductory physics courses at a large research university. In the first study, we investigated whether asking introductory physics students to indicate their gender immediately before taking the CSEM increased the gender gap compared to students who were not asked for this information. We found no difference in performance between male and female students in the two conditions. In the second study, which was conducted with several thousand introductory physics students, we investigated the prevalence of the belief that men generally perform better in physics than women and the extent to which this belief is correlated with the performance of both female and male students on the FCI and the CSEM in algebra-based and calculus-based physics courses. We found that at the end of the year-long calculus-based introductory physics sequence, in which female students are significantly underrepresented, agreeing with a gender stereotype was correlated negatively with the performance of female students on the conceptual physics surveys. The fact that female students who agreed with the gender stereotype performed worse than female students who disagreed with it at the end of the year-long calculus-based physics course may partly be due to an increased stereotype threat that female students who agree with the stereotype may experience in this course in which they are severely underrepresented.

The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) has been used to assess student understanding of introductory concepts of electricity and magnetism because many of the items on the CSEM have strong distractor choices which correspond to students’ alternate conceptions. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account common student difficulties in their instructional design. Here, we discuss research involving the CSEM to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): knowledge of introductory students’ alternate conceptions in electricity and magnetism as revealed by the CSEM. For each item on the CSEM, the TAs were asked to identify the most common incorrect answer choice selected by introductory physics students if they did not know the correct answer after traditional instruction. Then, we used introductory student CSEM post-test data to assess the extent to which TAs were able to identify the most common alternate conception of introductory students in each question on the CSEM. We find that the TAs were thoughtful when attempting to identify common student difficulties and they enjoyed learning about student difficulties this way. However, they struggled to identify many common difficulties of introductory students that persist after traditional instruction. We discuss specific alternate conceptions that persist after traditional instruction, the extent to which TAs were able to identify them, and results from think-aloud interviews with TAs which provided valuable information regarding why the TAs sometimes selected certain alternate conceptions as the most common but were instead very rare among introductory students. We also discuss how tasks such as the one used in this study can be used in professional development programs to engender productive discussions about the importance of being knowledgeable about student alternate conceptions in order to help students learn. Interviews with TAs engaged in this task as well as our experience with such tasks in our professional development programs suggest that they are beneficial.