Network analysis of students' drawn representations of an introductory lab

TL;DR

This study uses drawing-based surveys and network analysis to explore how students perceive their community of practice in an introductory physics lab, revealing diversity and group differences in perceptions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining drawing surveys with network analysis to study student perceptions of lab communities, highlighting differences across identity groups.

Findings

Diverse drawing elements centered on practices and community members.

Sparse depiction of goals across student perspectives.

Significant differences in elements between identity groups.

Abstract

Introductory physics labs can be designed and studied using the Communities of Practice framework, where a group of members pursues a common set of goals by learning and implementing a set of practices. Studies of student preferences and behaviors in lab show how students might perceive the introductory lab community differently, as they occupy different positions within the community and engage differently with its practices. Such differences can be particularly sharp along the dimensions of gender, college generation, and race. In this proof-of-concept study, we demonstrate how we can explore students' perceptions of the introductory lab community of practice using a drawing-based survey and network analysis. The survey collects students' expressions of their perspectives and explanations of the goals, members, and practices of the lab. We catalog the distinct elements from these drawings and categorize them as related to goals, members, and practices. With this quantitative count of drawing elements, network analysis gives an overview of how the elements in these drawings relate to each other while preserving the openness of student expression. We are particularly interested in the frequency of each element's depiction across the network and its betweenness centrality within the network. We collected N = 74 student drawings from a studio-format introductory physics for life sciences sequence. Our network analysis reveals a wide diversity of drawing elements with a focus on centralized hands-on practices and community members and a sparsity of goals across the students' perspectives. We demonstrate how some elements show differences with large effect sizes between identity groups based on gender, college generation, and racial background. We compare these differences to those found in observational studies and discuss future uses of the drawing survey and network analysis approach.