Speaker
Description
We examined a heterogenous group of students’ perspectives on roles, tools, and labs in small group during discourses in an introductory electricity and magnetism course within a studio physics format. We employed focus group interview to explore the perspectives of the group of two white men and one White woman. Results suggest that participants’ positively perceived the role of presentation of small group work to whole class as valuable for their learning, but they were nuances across participants. All participants agreed that roles emerged mostly spontaneously, but the woman and one of the men highlighted gender equity as crucial for equitable participation in discourses. All participants positively perceived the white board to be a central tool for their learning in the studio-styled course but differed in their perception of the labs in terms of meaningful learning. There is need for future research on fostering gender equity and attending to student’s perceptions in the studio-styled course, with pedagogical implications for active learning physics spaces.
