Gaining recognition from peers has been shown to improve student persistence and career intentions in physics. It is important, therefore, to understand how students develop perceptions of their peers. Prior research suggests that interactions are one possible mechanism for peer recognition: interacting with others allows students to demonstrate their physics skills and knowledge and acquire recognition as a physicist. To probe this explanation directly, we use methods from social network analysis to compare students' self-reported interactions to their recognition of strong peers.

Researchers have pinpointed recognition from others as one of the most important dimensions of students' science and engineering identity. Studies, however, have found gender biases in students' recognition of their peers, with inconsistent patterns across introductory science and engineering courses. Toward finding the source of this variation, we examine whether a gender bias exists in students' nominations of strong peers across three different remote, introductory physics courses with varying student populations (varying demographics, majors, and course levels).

Prior work has found inequities in what experimental roles students take on during instructional labs. Research also suggests that this role division might arise implicitly and that prompting explicit role negotiation might improve equity in lab group work. To understand these various ways students negotiate roles in their lab groups, we use the lens of positioning to analyze two different video episodes of a gender-and-race-diverse group of three students.

Natural language processing (NLP) has the capacity to increase the scale and efficiency of content analysis in Physics Education Research. One promise of this approach is the possibility of implementing coding schemes on large data sets taken from diverse contexts. Applying NLP has two main challenges, however. First, a large initial human-coded data set is needed for training, though it is not immediately clear how much training data are needed. Second, if new data are taken from a different context from the training data, automated coding may be impacted in unpredictable ways.

While understanding laboratory equipment is an important learning goal of physics laboratory (lab) instruction, previous studies have found inequities as to who gets to use equipment in in-person lab classes. With the transition to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, class dynamics changed and the effects on equipment usage remain unclear. As part of a larger effort to make intro physics labs more equitable, we investigated student equipment usage based on gender and race in two introductory physics lab courses, one taught in-person and one taught remotely.

Numerous studies have identified gender inequity in how students divide roles in lab courses. Few studies, however, have probed how these inequities impact women’s experimental physics identity development. In this work, we used closed-response surveys to investigate which lab tasks students view as part of “doing physics” and how these designations varied by gender. In both courses, we found that most students viewed working with the experimental apparatus, taking lab notes, doing data analysis, and thinking about the physics theory behind the experiment as part of doing physics.