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Social network analysis (SNA) has been widely used in physics education research (PER) in recent years, but mostly in a limited range of the available modalities. This paper describes a unique approach to egocentric, mixed-methods SNA…
In this paper, we describe two paradigms in physics education research (PER): recurrence-oriented and case-oriented PER. We connect theory on research methodologies in the social sciences to interviews with physics education researchers and…
Across the field of education research there has been an increased focus on the development, critique, and evaluation of statistical methods and data usage due to recently created, very large data sets and machine learning techniques. In…
Engaging in interactions with peers is important for student learning. Many studies have quantified patterns of student interactions in in-person physics courses using social network analysis, finding different network structures between…
Network autocorrelation models have been widely used for decades to model the joint distribution of the attributes of a network's actors. This class of models can estimate both the effect of individual characteristics as well as the network…
Student-to-student interactions are foundational to many active learning environments, but are most often studied using qualitative methods. Network analysis tools provide a quantitative complement to this picture, allowing researchers to…
While other fields such as statistics and education have examined various issues with quantitative work, few studies in physics education research (PER) have done so. We conducted a two-phase study to identify and to understand the extent…
Tie strengths in social networks are heterogeneous, with strong and weak ties playing different roles at both the network and the individual level. Egocentric networks, networks of relationships around a focal individual, exhibit a small…
Physics education researchers (PER) often analyze student data with single-level regression models (e.g., linear and logistic regression). However, education datasets can have hierarchical structures, such as students nested within courses,…
Although social neuroscience is concerned with understanding how the brain interacts with its social environment, prevailing research in the field has primarily considered the human brain in isolation, deprived of its rich social context.…
Much work in physics education research (PER) characterizes faculty teaching practice in terms of whether faculty use specific named PER-based teaching methods, either with fidelity or with adaptation; we call this research paradigm the…
The statistical modeling of random networks has been widely used to uncover interaction mechanisms in complex systems and to predict unobserved links in real-world networks. In many applications, network connections are collected via…
This study uses positional analysis to describe the student interaction networks in four research-based introductory physics curricula. Positional analysis is a technique for simplifying the structure of a network into blocks of actors…
Modeling power transmission networks is an important area of research with applications such as vulnerability analysis, study of cascading failures, and location of measurement devices. Graph-theoretic approaches have been widely used to…
Community-based professional development initiatives have been shown to support physics faculty in their adoption of research-based instructional strategies. Hoping to better understand these initiatives' mechanisms of success, we analyze…
This paper presents a methodological approach based on the use of complex networks to analyze the structure and content of curricula. We analyze the concept network built from the final year of a particular high school Physics curriculum,…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
Case-oriented physics education research - which seeks to refine and develop theory by linking that theory to cases - incorporates distinct practices for selecting data for analysis, generalizing results, and making causal claims.…
We describe a course designed to help future educators build an integrated understanding of the different elements of physics education research (PER), including: research into student learning, content knowledge from the perspective of how…