SJSU Physics Education Research Group

Welcome to the SJSU-PER Group

The SJSU-PER group investigates the ways in which learners and instructors interact productively with another when learning about physics in formal and informal settings.

Cassandra Paul’s research team seeks to understand interactions between instructors and students in the context of physics and other science courses. In particular, we examine two avenues for teacher-student exchange of ideas, classroom interactions (as measured by RIOT and SPOT), and exchanges that take place through assessments, written feedback, and grading.

Benedikt Harrer’s Productive Interactions and Ideas in Physics Laboratory (PI/IP Lab) aims to discover the multimodal, interactional resources learners and teachers use to develop and express their ideas together, and how these resources are used to make significant progress toward disciplinary engagement with the issues and practices in physics – to learn “how to do physics.”

We are interested in the implications of our findings for curricular reform and instructor professional development.