Collaborative Proposal: Assessing, Investigating and Fostering Transformative Experiences in Undergraduate Physics

智力优势：最近的国家文件和关于中学后教育的研究报告呼吁注意培养具有科学素养的公民的重要性以及我们目前在满足这一需要的努力中存在的缺陷。 物理教育的研究主要集中在学生在课程中发展的知识，以及在更有限的程度上，学生是否将知识从一门课程转移到下一门课程。 学生的物理学习在多大程度上影响了他们在学校以外的经验是显着不足的研究。这样的时刻--学生积极使用科学概念以有意义的新方式看待和体验日常世界的经历--被教育心理学家普称为“变革性经历”。该项目的目标是开发评估工具，以确定物理课程以何种方式产生变革性体验（TE），并通过这些评估工具的迭代开发，检查变革性体验的性质和促进它们的课堂实践。这些工作为进一步改革理科本科教育奠定了基础：（1）将物理教育研究与变革经验的研究主体联系起来，为以前物理教学的欠发达目标和物理教育的欠发达方面提供了一种语言;（2）开发评估工具，使教师和研究人员能够快速检查物理课堂中变革性经验的普遍性;（3）通过提供学生经验的案例研究来调查变革性经验的性质;（4）检查富含变革性经验的课程，以了解促进TE的教学实践。 更广泛的影响：该项目是：（1）通过调查的发展和传播，为物理教育研究界提供一种评估和促进本科物理学变革经验的手段;（2）建立三个校区的物理教育和教育心理学研究人员之间的合作，加强基于学科的物理教育研究之间的联系，（通常位于本科课堂）和更广泛的教育研究社区（研究主要集中在K-12教室）;（3）解决职前教师的需要，他们是所研究课程的主要学生群体，也是项目雇用的学生研究人员;以及（4）服务于传统上在理科-初等教育专业-代表性不足的人口，其中90%是妇女。

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.