Abstract
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in students’ beliefs on the relevance of physics but frequently the results show a negative shift in students’ beliefs and are often reported as a failure of students to “see the relevance.” We challenge this view by highlighting the limitations of attitudinal and epistemological surveys’ ability to probe relevance. We then articulate a more expansive view of relevance using ecological systems theory that serves as a lens we apply to analyze students’ experiences. Instead of deficit-framing students’ abilities or challenging their beliefs about the relevance of physics, we show how incorporating their rich disciplinary experiences can make physics classrooms truly more relevant.Received 30 August 2018DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020121Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasEpistemology, attitudes, & beliefsInstructional strategiesLearning environmentResearch methodologyProfessional TopicsLower undergraduate studentsPhysics Education Research
Highlights
National policy recommendations for the integration of knowledge across the disciplines continue to position physics concepts and reasoning skills as being important and useful to degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or careers in the health sciences [1,2]
We focus our attention on the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX), Epistemological Beliefs Assessment for Physical Science (EBAPS), and Views About Science Survey (VASS) [4,6,12,20]
We argue that results from clusters probing relevance are not sufficient to form a complete answer to the following question: Do students believe physics is relevant to them? The majority of the work on relevance in physics education research (PER) [4,6,12,20,22] has been centered on the local context of the physics classroom, how physics may impact students’ future careers, or how students relate physics to their world
Summary
National policy recommendations for the integration of knowledge across the disciplines continue to position physics concepts and reasoning skills as being important and useful to degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or careers in the health sciences [1,2]. Many undergraduate students pursuing a degree in STEM will be required to complete an introductory physics course [3] but research in physics education research (PER) suggests that students do not share the belief that physics is relevant to them [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. It is important to the success of these students, who do not plan on pursuing physics as a career, that they build connections from physics to their lives [4,15]. We critically examine the implications of having an incomplete picture of students’ abilities in connecting physics to their lives. We discuss how this incomplete picture perpetuates deficit interpretations of the abilities of life science majors
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