arXiv subjects

W. Brian Lane

Publications and source records attributed to W. Brian Lane.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Network lexical analysis of student integration of music and physics knowledge

Introductory physics students benefit from learning to integrate new physics knowledge with prior knowledge related to their interests. Writing assignments that offer high epistemic agency can foster this integration, and provide rich artifacts for qualitative analysis. Physics education researchers are increasingly interested in studying such artifacts using computer-based textual analysis. In this paper, we use lexical methods to look for evidence of knowledge integration in written assignments from a Physics of Music course. These assignments require students to communicate to an external audience a clear and cohesive narrative that synthesizes concepts from music and physics. To apply this methodology, we first establish a lexicon of music, physics, and integrated keywords that 10 students used across 6 writing assignments. Then, we visualize this word usage in a series of network diagrams based on which keywords were used in proximity to each other in each assignment. We find that students most strongly connected ideas from music and physics using keywords related to the physical structure of sound (sound, frequency, and wave). Applying these methods to each assignment prompt and its resulting student submissions, we find that, in assignments with a lower degree of epistemic agency (assessed qualitatively by our experience teaching the course), students primarily followed the example of integration modeled by the assignment prompt, but in assignments with a higher degree of epistemic agency, they explored music-physics integration to a greater degree. We use this analysis to offer a pedagogical contribution to introductory physics courses centered around students' interests, a theoretical contribution by illustrating a means of quantifying epistemic agency, and a methodological contribution that complements textual analysis and offers the scalability sought in such approaches.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2025

Network analysis of students' drawn representations of an introductory lab

Introductory physics labs can be designed and studied using the Communities of Practice framework, where a group of members pursues a common set of goals by learning and implementing a set of practices. Studies of student preferences and behaviors in lab show how students might perceive the introductory lab community differently, as they occupy different positions within the community and engage differently with its practices. Such differences can be particularly sharp along the dimensions of gender, college generation, and race. In this proof-of-concept study, we demonstrate how we can explore students' perceptions of the introductory lab community of practice using a drawing-based survey and network analysis. The survey collects students' expressions of their perspectives and explanations of the goals, members, and practices of the lab. We catalog the distinct elements from these drawings and categorize them as related to goals, members, and practices. With this quantitative count of drawing elements, network analysis gives an overview of how the elements in these drawings relate to each other while preserving the openness of student expression. We are particularly interested in the frequency of each element's depiction across the network and its betweenness centrality within the network. We collected N = 74 student drawings from a studio-format introductory physics for life sciences sequence. Our network analysis reveals a wide diversity of drawing elements with a focus on centralized hands-on practices and community members and a sparsity of goals across the students' perspectives. We demonstrate how some elements show differences with large effect sizes between identity groups based on gender, college generation, and racial background. We compare these differences to those found in observational studies and discuss future uses of the drawing survey and network analysis approach.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2025

Divine Social Networking in the Age of Lost Omens

The last two years have seen significant changes in the divine pantheon of the Lost Omens campaign setting of the Pathfinder Tabletop Roleplaying Game. First, the Pathfinder Remaster, necessitated by the Open Game License debacle, prompted the removal of alignment and an enrichment of divine identities and relationships. Second, the War of Immortals, kicked off by the death of one of the core 20 deities, shook up the membership and relationships within the setting's primary pantheon. These two changes prompted the reprinting of deity information in Pathfinder: Lost Omens Divine Mysteries, which updates and replaces the pre-Remaster Pathfinder: Lost Omens Gods & Magic. Notably, Divine Mysteries features double the page count profiling the core 20 deities. In this paper, we use social network analysis to examine the impact of these changes (Remaster, War of Immortals, and page count) on the relationships among the core 20 deities. In this analysis, each deity features as a node, connected by edges that represent the number of times each pair of deities is mentioned in each other's profiles. The results reveal a much richer, more connected divine network in Divine Mysteries than in Gods & Magic. We conclude by discussing implications for the Lost Omens campaign setting and areas of future development.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2021

Student Representations of Computation in the Physics Community

Undergraduate physics education has greatly benefited from the introduction of computational activities. However, despite the benefits computation has delivered, we still lack a complete understanding of the computationally integrated learning experience from the student perspective. In particular, we are interested in investigating how students develop expert-like perceptions of computation as a practice within the professional physics community. To investigate this aspect of student development, we employ the Communities of Practice framework, which describes how students navigate through a professional community by appropriating the community's practices and goals as personally important. We introduce the construct of a COP-Model as a student's internal representation of a professional community that they develop as they navigate that community. We used this construct to formulate a set of research questions and semistructured interview protocols to explore how five physics students represent the use of computation in their mental models of the global physics community. We foreground these representations in the local academic community established by their instructors in three concurrent computationally integrated physics courses. We find that these students saw computation as a normal and valuable part of physics practice, identified benefits of using computation in alignment with the physics community, struggle with confidence with regards to computation, and demonstrate some expectations for computational proficiency that are misaligned with the physics community. We establish these themes with interview excerpts and discuss implications for instruction and future research.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2021

Analysis of the PICUP Collection: Strengths and Areas for Development

The PICUP Collection of Exercise Sets (https://www.compadre.org/PICUP/exercises/) contains over 60 peer-reviewed computation-infused activities for use in various physics courses from high school through graduate study. Each Exercise Set includes an instructor guide, student-facing exercises, and sample implementations for one or more programming platforms. We present an analysis of this Collection based on Exercise Set traits such as course level, word count, completion time, course context, computational methods, programming platforms, and engagement elements. This analysis highlights the strengths of the PICUP Collection (such as variety in subject and method coverage) and where there is ample room for development (such as expansion of high school- and advanced-level offerings and a greater representation of programming platforms).

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2012

Signatures of quantum phase transitions in parallel quantum dots: Crossover from local-moment to underscreened spin-1 Kondo physics

We study a strongly interacting "quantum dot 1" and a weakly interacting "dot 2" connected in parallel to metallic leads. Gate voltages can drive the system between Kondo-quenched and non-Kondo free-moment phases separated by Kosterlitz-Thouless quantum phase transitions. Away from the immediate vicinity of the quantum phase transitions, the physical properties retain signatures of first-order transitions found previously to arise when dot 2 is strictly noninteracting. As interactions in dot 2 become stronger relative to the dot-lead coupling, the free moment in the non-Kondo phase evolves smoothly from an isolated spin-one-half in dot 1 to a many-body doublet arising from the incomplete Kondo compensation by the leads of a combined dot spin-one. These limits, which feature very different spin correlations between dot and lead electrons, can be distinguished by weak-bias conductance measurements performed at finite temperatures.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2011

Enhancing Introductory Student Motivation with a Major-Managed Course Blog: A Pilot Study

Enhancing motivation and learning attitudes in an introductory physics course is an important but difficult task that can be achieved through class blogging. We incorporated into an introductory course a blog operated by upper-level physics students. Using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), periodic in-class surveys, analysis of student blog comments, and post-instructional interviews, we evaluate how the blog combined with class instruction provided the students with a better sense of relevance and confidence and outline recommendations for future use of this strategy.

physics.ed-ph↗