Centering students' perspectives in computation-integrated physics curricula

Physics education researchers and curriculum developers have recognized the experiential expertise of students, using students' perspectives to make improvements to curriculum and pedagogy. Recently, they have given students more control in this process, sometimes even a direct voice in curricular decision-making. This dissertation intends to introduce and apply these student-centered research methods to a new type of curriculum: computation-integrated physics. Even though computational modeling is being integrated widely into physics curricula as a learning tool, there is no consensus on assessment, curriculum, or learning goals. This gap provides an opportunity to build an understanding of what matters to students in this new context from students' perspectives and make recommendations for curriculum and pedagogy. Using a qualitative case study methodology, I present an in-depth view of how students perceive their experiences in these computation-integrated classrooms. In total, the dissertation spans four studies in two research contexts. The first study illustrates how case study can be used to center a student's perspective on her experience as an undergraduate learning assistant in a computation-integrated physics course. Building on the first study, the second study is a more in-depth case study on the cohort of learning assistants in the course, in effect demonstrating how students' perspectives can be translated into pedagogical expertise when examined with an attention to context and a grounding in a theoretical perspective. For the last two studies, I shifted the research context to a computation-integrated high school physics class. The third study is an exploration of students' accounts of the challenges they face when doing computational activities in their physics class, including those related to computation, the integration of computation with physics, and the contextual factors in the classroom. Using the students' perspectives once again, the fourth study uses a theoretical framework to characterize students' tendencies to engage productively with computation. This final study demonstrates that examining students' perspectives with a theoretical basis and contextual attentiveness can provide a platform to step into student-centered curricular change in computation-integrated physics. Overall, these research studies come together in this dissertation to show that paying attention to students' perspectives and affect in computation-integrated physics courses is key to understanding how to support students when teaching a computation-integrated curriculum. The findings also bring researchers and curriculum developers a few steps closer to infusing students' perspectives directly into curricular and pedagogical decisions in computation-integrated educational settings.