We use the theory of communities of practice and the concept of accountable disciplinary knowledge to describe how a learning community develops in the context of an upper-division physics laboratory course. The change in accountable disciplinary knowledge motivates students' enculturation into a community of practice. The enculturation…

Previous research into problem solving in physics resulted in researchers introducing six epistemic games to describe the organizational structures of locally coherent resources. We present a new epistemic game--the "answer-making epistemic game"--which was identified in this paper through the analysis of interviews carried out to validate a…

We use epistemological framing to interpret participants' behavior during group problem-solving sessions in an intermediate mechanics course. We are interested in how students frame discussion and in how the groups shift discussion framings. Our analysis includes two framing axes, expansive vs narrow and serious vs silly, which together…

We present data from a between-student study on student response to questions on Newton's third law given in two introductory calculus-based physics classes (Mechanics and Electromagnetism) at a large northeastern university. Construction of a response curve reveals subtle dynamics in student learning not capturable by pretesting and post-testing.…

We investigate the interplay between mathematics and physics resources in intermediate mechanics students. In the mechanics course, the selection and application of coordinate systems is a consistent thread. At the University of Maine, students often start the course with a strong preference to use Cartesian coordinates, in accordance with their…