Cognitive Accessibility, Lab Validity, and Cultural Aspects

There is a fascinating new paper on PR:PER this week in which Heckler and Bogdan propose a model of student reasoning based on cognitive accessibility, or "what comes to mind" (as opposed to cognitive availability, the things a student knows). A key teaching take-away, I think, is the importance of presenting students with contexts in which there isn't a single obvious conclusion. Unlike many PER papers, I think this one does a really good job presenting pedagogical implications (in the introduction and discussion), so it's worth a look!

I've been thinking lately about the question of how we should teach students to address questions of validity in their lab courses. Fortunately, there's a great paper by Hu and Zwickl that tackles this exact topic. Based on the results of a survey, they found that introductory physics students tend to focus on whether their results agreed with theory or their peers, and pointed to experimental imperfections and "human error" as the causes for disagreement. There's a lot of good insight in this analysis, and I'm looking forward to seeing where we go from here.

Two papers about cultural aspects of science education caught my eye this week. Wan, Zhang, and Wei write about science teachers' views on nature of science, and make a convincing case that it needs to be taught differently in China than in the West. Meanwhile, Le and Matias have written an engaging paper that brings critical whiteness studies to science education. I'm going to read and reflect on both of these papers over the coming week.

Physics Today had an interesting article about scientists who are displaced because of violence or persecution. Physics has a history of this type of humanitarian work, and it's good to see it continue.

There is a great discussion about diversity on the Modeling Instruction mailserv, so if you're a high school teacher interested in those things, but not yet a modeler, now is a great time to join.

Seen on the web:
I enjoyed reading this sometimes-technical tribute to mathematician Claire Voisin.
Massimo reminded us of this great resource for animations of waves.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has a twitter thread of advice for people of color in grad school.
Moses Rifkin has a thread about how teachers can work toward equity.