Intellectual Merit: Recent national documents and studies of post-secondary education call attention to the importance of developing a scientifically literate citizenry and the current shortcomings in our efforts to address this need. Research in physics education has focused most closely on the knowledge students develop within courses, and to a more limited extent, whether students transfer knowledge from one course to the next. The extent to which students' physics learning influences their experience outside of school is dramatically under-researched. Such moments - experiences in which students actively use science concepts to see and experience their everyday world in meaningful, new ways - has been termed by educational psychologist Pugh to be 'transformative experiences.'
The goal of this project is to develop assessment tools to identify in what ways physics courses engender transformative experiences (TE), and, through the iterative development of these assessment tools, examine the nature of transformative experiences and the classroom practices that foster them. Such work lays the groundwork for further transforming undergraduate education in the sciences by: (1) connecting physics education research with the body of research on transformative experience, providing a language for what has previously been an under-developed goal of physics instruction and an under-researched aspect of physics education; (2) developing assessment tools to allow instructors and researchers to quickly examine the prevalence of transformative experiences in physics classrooms; (3) investigating the nature of transformative experience, by providing case studies of students' experiences; and (4) examining courses rich in transformative experiences to understand the instructional practices that foster TE.
Broader Impacts: The project is: (1) providing the physics education research community with a means of evaluating and fostering transformative experiences in undergraduate physics through the development and dissemination of a survey; (2) establishing collaborations between researchers in physics education and educational psychology from three separate campuses, building stronger links between discipline-based physics education research (which typically situates itself in the undergraduate classroom), and the broader education research community (where research primarily centers on K-12 classrooms); (3) addressing the needs of pre-service teachers, who are the primary student population of the courses being studied and the student-researchers employed on the project; and (4) serving a population traditionally underrepresented in the sciences - elementary education majors, 90% of whom are women.
