In the summer of 2020, as COVID-19 limited in-person research opportunities and created additional barriers for many students, institutions either canceled or remotely hosted their research experience for undergraduates (REU) programs. The present qualitative phenomenographic study was designed to explore some of the possible limitations, challenges, and outcomes of this remote experience. Overall, 94 interviews were conducted with paired participants; mentees (N = 10) and mentors (N = 8) from six different REU programs. By drawing on cultural-historical activity theory as a framework, our study uncovers some of the challenges mentees faced while pursuing their research objectives and academic goals. These challenges included motivation, limited access to technology at home, limited communication among REU students, barriers in mentor-mentee relationships, and differing expectations about doing research. Despite the challenges, all mentees reported that this experience was highly beneficial. Comparisons between the outcomes of these remote REUs and published outcomes of in-person undergraduate research programs reveal many similar benefits, including student integration into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics culture. Our study suggests that remote research programs could be considered a means to expand access to undergraduate research experiences even after COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted.

As students pursue a bachelor's degree in physics, they may ponder over which area to specialize in, such as theory, computation, or experiment. Often students develop preferences and dislikes, but it's unclear when this preference solidifies during their undergraduate experiences. To better understand, we interviewed eighteen physics majors at different stages of their degrees regarding their interest in theory, computation, and experimental methods. Out of the eighteen students, we analyzed only nine students who rated computation and theory the lowest. Our analysis did not include interest in the experiment because the ratings were less negative. We used Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and Lucidchart to analyze students' responses and create individual graphical representations of the influences for each student. Through this, we uncovered how various factors such as learning experiences, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations influenced their low interest in a particular method. We found that lack of knowledge and experience is often the main reason why self-efficacy was lower. Students' lack of interest is also influenced by negative outcome expectations (e.g., math-intensive and a bad work-life balance) more than other SCCT factors. Our findings could help physics departments and educators identify positive and negative factors that could lead to a more motivating and inclusive physics curriculum.

Analogies are known to be powerful tools for making sense of unfamiliar ideas in terms of already understood concepts. Science students regularly encounter unfamiliar ideas, such as microscopic objects that are invisible to our everyday experience and behaviors dictated by quantum mechanics. An understanding of basic concepts of quantum mechanics is useful in many disciplines, especially with the growing field of quantum information sciences and technologies. Physics researchers often use analogies in their own research and science communicators use them to make quantum ideas accessible to K-12 students and across STEM disciplines, but analogy use in upper-division teaching has been less researched. Our research goal is to understand how analogies are used to teach quantum mechanics, and specifically, what prior knowledge is used as a basis for analogies within two widely used quantum mechanics textbooks. This textbook analysis shows the most common bases for analogies include: mathematical structures from linear algebra, which are applied to model quantum systems; everyday life examples, which are used to make quantum systems more familiar and understandable; and macroscopic classical phenomena, which are used to highlight differences between classical and quantum mechanics. We also find authors use different conventions, based on the various cue words that authors use to indicate analogy-based reasoning. In the STEM classroom, this research has implications for enhancing student learning about abstract topics in science.

In the summer of 2020, due to COVID-19, institutions either canceled or remotely hosted their research experience for undergraduates (REU) programs. We carried out a 16-week longitudinal study examining the impact of these fully remote research experiences on mentees' psychosocial gains (e.g., identity). We studied the phenomenon of a remote research experience from the standpoint of the mentees (N = 10) and their mentors (N = 8), who were each interviewed seven and three times, respectively (94 total interviews). All mentees reported that this experience was highly beneficial through different factors such as other recognition and self-recognition, which led to their development of a sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and identity despite working remotely. Then, we synthesize these results with prior literature and develop a framework showing how different experiences and constructs affect the physics and researcher identity development. Gaining a greater understanding regarding factors leading to the growth of psychosocial gains may help REU coordinators and REU mentors to redesign their undergraduate research program and provide the support that their mentees' need to have a positive undergraduate research experience.

Understanding how physicists solve problems can guide the development of methods that help students learn and improve at solving complex problems. Leveraging the framework of cognitive task analysis, we conducted semistructured interviews with theoretical physicists (N 1/4 11) to gain insight into the cognitive processes and skills that they use in their professional research. Among numerous activities that theorists described, here we elucidate two activities that theorists commonly characterized as being integral to their work: making assumptions and using analogies. Theorists described making assumptions throughout their research process, especially while setting their project's direction and goals, establishing their model's interaction with mathematics, and revising their model while troubleshooting. They described how assumptions about their model informed their mathematical decision making, as well as instances where mathematical steps fed back into their model's applicability. We found that theorists used analogies to generate new project ideas as well as overcome conceptual challenges. Theorists deliberately sought out or constructed analogies, indicating this is a skill students can practice. When mapping knowledge from one system to another, theorists used systems that shared a high degree of mathematical similarity; however, these systems did not always share similar surface features. We conclude by discussing connections between the ways theorists use assumption and analogy and offering potential new avenues of research regarding applications to instruction.

Due to the growing concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities either canceled or remotely hosted their 2020 National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs. This analysis is part of a larger study examining the impact of these fully remote experiences on professional and psychosocial factors such as mentees' sense of belonging, identity, and self-efficacy and their retention in STEM degree programs. We present a single-student case study and describe the dramaturgical analysis which centers on identifying five fundamental constructs within the data: objectives, conflicts, tactics, attitudes, and emotions. These items investigate what the participant in the remote REU program experienced and how this experience changed the ways in which he thinks about his future career decision making. Our analysis explored four different sub-narratives: lack of community in virtual REU, mentor support, perception of the real nature of the experience in a virtual format, and future career decision-making. The mentee reported that this experience was highly beneficial and that he developed a sense of belonging and identity, despite working remotely - often from his own bedroom.

The ways in which physics majors make career decisions is a critical, yet understudied, aspect of the undergraduate experience. Such decisions are important to students, physics departments, and administrators. In this project, we specifically examine how students develop interests and intent to pursue specific subfields of physics by interviewing 13 physics majors from all years of study. The interviews examined factors that led students to choose their most preferred and least preferred subfields. Interviews leveraged the framework of Social Cognitive Career Theory, a model that describes how several constructs such as self-efficacy, learning experiences, and outcome expectations relate to decision-making Findings highlight the differences in decision-making between upper-division students and beginning students. For instance, we see how popular culture and popular science provide an initial learning experience about certain subfields, such as astronomy and astrophysics, which strongly affect beginning students' perceptions of that subfield. Initial exposure to biology and chemistry in high school or early undergraduate classes often negatively affected students' interests in fields like biophysics or chemical physics. Data also suggests a splitting between students with respect to their outcome expectations of a desirable career in science. While some students prioritize using science to help people, others prioritize discovery of new knowledge through science, and some are in between. Students in both groups form perceptions about subfields that do not align with their identities and hence make decisions based on these perceptions. For instance, a student who prioritizes helping others through science may be quick to reject astrophysics as a subfield choice as they do not think that astrophysics can help people enough.

Students' use of support from peers and instructors is an important aspect of success in college. This preliminary phenomenographic study examines a variety of help seeking behaviors of undergraduate majors in physics and life sciences and factors that lead to those behaviors. Seven students described their experiences using semistructured interviews during the summer of 2021. The analysis was structured around identifying characteristics of peers and instructors, as well as personal help-seeking attitudes, that either promoted help seeking or help avoidance. Peers were generally the first source of help, and were prioritized based on ability and the closeness of the relationship. Instructors fostered help seeking through availability and a non-judgemental demeanor. A feeling of vulnerability and fear of judgement was cited as the most common reason for avoiding help. The findings provide insights for faculty and departments seeking to encourage student success.

Many of the activities and cognitive processes that physicists use while solving problems are invisible to students, which can hinder their acquisition of important expert-like skills. Whereas the detailed calculations performed by researchers are often published in journals and textbooks, other activities such as those undertaken while planning how to approach a problem are rarely discussed in published research. Hence, these activities are especially hidden from students. To better understand how physicists solve problems in their professional research, we leveraged the framework of cognitive task analysis to conduct semi-structured interviews with theoretical physicists (N = 11). Here we elucidate the role of planning and preliminary analysis in theorists' work. Theorists described using a variety of activities in order to decide if their project was doable while also generating possible solution paths. These actions included doing preliminary calculations, reflecting on previous knowledge, gaining intuition and understanding by studying prior work, and reproducing previous results. We found that theorists typically did not pursue projects unless they had a clear idea of what the outcome of their project would be, or at least knew that they would be able to make progress on the problem. Thus, this preliminary design and analysis phase was highly important for theorists despite being largely hidden from students. We conclude by suggesting potential ways to incorporate our findings into the classroom to give students more numerous opportunities to engage in these expert-like practices.

Learning physics in any context, including undergraduate research experiences, requires learning its concepts and the relational structure between those new concepts with what students already know. We use concept maps, a knowledge elicitation method, for assessing mentees' and mentors' knowledge structures during Research Experience for Undergraduates programs. The study looked at maps from seven mentor-mentee pairs to understand how mentors and mentees use specific knowledge and strategies during the development of their concept maps. A qualitative analysis of the maps showed mentors and mentees differed in their ways of organizing and displaying their knowledge in terms of structure, scale, language, and use of conceptual and procedural knowledge. For instance, mentees used more procedural knowledge. It is perhaps due to their perception of finishing their Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) projects and the fact that they may have only limited and superficial knowledge of specific topics. However, mentors maps were smaller but more significant in using more comprehensive conceptual knowledge and connecting their maps to the broader scientific context.