Designing Integrated Structural Support for Epistemology, Growth Mindset, and Sense of Belonging in Introductory Physics

该项目旨在通过建立实践来提高学生在物理方面的心态和坚持不懈，从而服务于国家利益。这个项目计划调查设计物理入门课程的新方法，以培养学生对自己学习的有效信念。目标信念与学生的学习、学业成绩和幸福感相关。这个项目希望通过产生明确的设计原则来发展这些目标信念，从而推动教学设计的科学化。设计工作将集中在课程和政策如何默契地传达和强化生产性信念，并促进学生参与。由于物理导论是许多本科生STEM专业的早期核心课程，通过该项目开发的改进可以提高本科生对STEM的早期坚持性，并为STEM学生未来的成功播种。本项目将反复设计一门招生人数较多的物理入门课程的课程结构，以促进学生对自身学习信念的三个关键方面的积极发展：物理认识论、成长心态和归属感。虽然在其他项目中已经开发了积极影响这些与教育相关的信念的方法，但以前的方法往往孤立地考虑一种信念，对这些信念及其发展可能如何相关的洞察很少。为了调查和改善学生对自己学习的信念，这个项目使用了一种基于设计的研究方法。该项目将反复开发教学设计原则，重点是如何通过三种课堂实践将这三种信念与课程活动和教师信息相结合：(I)重视学习时间；(Ii)谈论和解决错误的想法；以及(Iii)引出、分享和参与他人的想法。设计迭代将通过使用学生反思、课堂观察、访谈和调查数据的混合方法进行。NSF IUSE：EHR计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生的STEM教育的有效性。通过其参与的学生学习跟踪，该计划支持有前途的实践和工具的创建、探索和实施。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project aims to serve the national interest by establishing practices to improve student mindset and persistence in physics. This project plans to investigate new methods for designing introductory physics courses to develop productive student beliefs about their own learning. The target beliefs are correlated with students' learning, academic achievement, and well-being. This project hopes to advance the science of instructional design through the goal of producing clear design principles for developing these target beliefs. Design efforts will focus on how course curriculum and policies can tacitly communicate and reinforce productive beliefs and promote student engagement. Because introductory physics is an early core course in many undergraduate STEM majors, the improvements developed through this project can improve early undergraduate persistence in STEM and seed future success of STEM students. This project will iteratively design the course structures of a large-enrollment introductory physics course to promote positive development of three key aspects of students' beliefs about their own learning: physics epistemology, growth mindset, and sense of belonging. Though approaches for positively impacting these educationally relevant beliefs have been developed in other projects, prior approaches often consider one kind of belief in isolation, providing little insight into how these beliefs and their development may be related. To investigate and improve students' beliefs about their own learning, this project uses a design-based research approach. The project will iteratively develop instructional design principles centered on how these three beliefs can be coherently integrated with course activities and instructor messaging through three classroom practices: (i) valuing learning over time, (ii) talking about and resolving wrong ideas, and (iii) eliciting, sharing, and engaging with others' ideas. Design iterations will be informed by a mixed methods approach using student reflections, classroom observations, interviews, and survey data. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.