Many college students experience introductory physics as psychologically threatening. In a preregistered RCT, we applied the biopsychosocial model of challenge-threat to describe patterns of threat in introductory physics and test whether a 5-d mindfulness training could reduce threat and increase engagement among undergraduates. Course-wide surveys (N = 954) screened students for the RCT and revealed roughly half of students experience psychological threat. Students identified with systemically excluded groups were more likely to experience psychological threat while systemically advantaged students were more likely to experience psychological challenge in their introductory physics course. In the RCT (N = 149), mindfulness training reduced psychological threat and fostered greater engagement in introductory physics, and, consistent with our theory of change, mindfulness training was associated with greater physics engagement through reductions in threat. The results demonstrate that mindfulness can help students manage stress more effectively by reducing psychological threat and fostering engagement in contexts like introductory physics.

The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semistructured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their class on a screening survey. Participants were asked to share general reflections on challenges and successes they experienced, as well as their reflections on specific aspects of the course (e.g., experiences with instructors and peers). Interview transcripts were then coded to identify the types of experiences students reported, whether they were experienced as positive or negative, as well as the themes and features associated with those experiences. Experiences with the classroom, course structure, instructors, and exams were most frequently reported as negative. Experiences with peers, help-seeking, course curriculum, and specific learning activities were the most positive, although only experiences with peers had more positive than negative reports. We then used a framework [M. D. Seery, The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat: Using the heart to measure the mind, ] to interpret the common instructional, cognitive, and motivational themes and features reported across multiple contexts. We discuss the implications of the results for theory and practice.

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Designing physics courses that support students' activation and development of expert-like physics epistemologies is a significant goal of Physics Education Research. However, very little research has focused on how physics students' interactions with course structures resonate with different epistemological views. As part of a course redesign effort to increase student success in introductory physics, we interviewed introductory physics students about their experiences with course structures and their learning and belonging beliefs. We present here a case from this broader data corpus in which a student, Robyn, discusses his epistemological views of physics problem solving and his experiences with physics lectures, office hours, and discussion sections. We find that Robyn's physics epistemology manifests consistently across his interactions with each of these different course structures, suggesting a possible resonance between students' beliefs and their experiences with course structures and the value of further investigation into the potential merits of comprehensive course design.

Zwitterionic liquids (Zw-ILs) have been developed that are homologous to monovalent ionic liquids (ILs) and show great promise for controlled dissolution of cellulosic biomass. Using both high energy X-ray scattering and atomistic molecular simulations, this article compares the bulk liquid structural properties for novel Zw-ILs with their homologous ILs. It is shown that the significant localization of the charges on Zw-ILs leads to charge ordering similar to that observed for conventional ionic liquids with monovalent anions and cations. A low-intensity first sharp diffraction peak in the liquid structure factor S(q) is observed for both the Zw-IL and the IL. This is unexpected since both the Zw-IL and IL have a 2-(2-methoxyethoxy)ethyl (diether) functional group on the cationic imidazolium ring and ether functional groups are known to suppress this peak. Detailed analyses show that this intermediate range order in the liquid structure arises for slightly different reasons in the Zw-IL vs. the IL. For the Zw-IL, the ether tails in the liquid are shown to aggregate into nanoscale domains.

Conceptual knowledge is only one part of what students need to learn to solve problems. Knowing how to reason through a problem is also an important skill. In this paper, we study the effects of a computer-based training on students' reasoning on introductory physics problems. Participants solved three sets of conceptual problems, each of them containing three training problems with solutions followed by one near transfer problem and one far transfer problem. We analyzed students' verbal answers to elucidate the reasoning resources that they activated to construct the different explanations to the problems. We found that the students changed their reasoning when presented with solutions to training problems and later posed a transfer problem. Our results provide insights into students' activation of their resources and the procedure they used to construct their reasoning in response to the training problems.