Student Representations of Computation in the Physics Community

TL;DR

This study explores how physics students develop perceptions of computation as a professional practice, revealing their views, confidence levels, and misconceptions within the physics community through interviews grounded in the Communities of Practice framework.

Contribution

It introduces the COP-Model to analyze students' internal representations of the physics community's computational practices and investigates their development through qualitative interviews.

Findings

Students see computation as integral to physics practice.

Students recognize benefits of computation but lack confidence.

Some student expectations about computational proficiency are misaligned with the physics community.

Abstract

Undergraduate physics education has greatly benefited from the introduction of computational activities. However, despite the benefits computation has delivered, we still lack a complete understanding of the computationally integrated learning experience from the student perspective. In particular, we are interested in investigating how students develop expert-like perceptions of computation as a practice within the professional physics community. To investigate this aspect of student development, we employ the Communities of Practice framework, which describes how students navigate through a professional community by appropriating the community's practices and goals as personally important. We introduce the construct of a COP-Model as a student's internal representation of a professional community that they develop as they navigate that community. We used this construct to formulate a set of research questions and semistructured interview protocols to explore how five physics students represent the use of computation in their mental models of the global physics community. We foreground these representations in the local academic community established by their instructors in three concurrent computationally integrated physics courses. We find that these students saw computation as a normal and valuable part of physics practice, identified benefits of using computation in alignment with the physics community, struggle with confidence with regards to computation, and demonstrate some expectations for computational proficiency that are misaligned with the physics community. We establish these themes with interview excerpts and discuss implications for instruction and future research.