New study examines how physics students perceive recognition

Experts see peer recognition as important to student success in physics, and a new study gives college-level physics instructors insight into how students perceive the message from their classmates that “you’re good at physics.”

Even when women receive similar amounts of recognition from peers as men for excelling in physics classes, they perceive significantly less peer recognition, the researchers found. “Men are internalizing their recognition differently than women,” said Natasha Holmes, professor of physics at Cornell University.

Holmes is corresponding author of the paper “Bias in Physics Peer Recognition Does Not Explain Gaps in Perceived Peer Recognition,” which is published in Nature Physics.

“This research fits into the broader goal of physics education research, to understand how we support students to make sure they are successful, and how we figure out where we can intervene,” Holmes said.

“We know from the research that having teachers and parents recognize students as being good at physics is important, but peers’ recognition is a huge part. Small interactions can take place that either pull someone in or push someone out.”

With the goal of advancing physics teaching and learning, physics education research uses data-driven outcomes to explore what students are learning and how to help instructors promote student learning. The subfield has been active within physics for decades in the U.S., Holmes said, and to have this study published in a leading international physics journal signals its growth and acceptance broadly.

The article is the first on physics education research to be published in Nature Physics since editors invited submissions from the subfield in March 2024.

Past studies, including at Cornell, have examined how undergraduate physics students receive recognition from peers for being good at physics; other studies have looked at how they perceive those messages.

This is the first study to examine the relationship between receiving and perceiving messages of positive recognition, said first author Meagan Sundstrom, Ph.D. ’24, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University. The team developed and tested three possible relationships based on prior literature, each of which could inspire future study, she said.

Sundstrom designed the study to directly compare the number of nominations students receive from their peers for being strong in their physics course (a stand-in for received peer recognition) to the extent to which students feel recognized by their peers (perceived peer recognition.) The study included more than 1,700 undergraduate students enrolled in 27 courses at eight institutions in the U.S.

Although men and women received proportional recognition from peers in their physics lab classes, men received disproportionate recognition in their physics lecture classes. But men reported significantly higher perceptions of peer recognition than women in both lab and lecture courses.

“For students receiving the same amount of peer recognition … women report significantly lower perceived peer recognition than men,” the researchers wrote.

“We learned that the place for intervention is on perception of recognition—on how students are internalizing the recognition they are receiving,” Holmes said.

The study provides a guide for further research to find out why peer recognition has different impacts, and to design and test specific classroom techniques to support all students’ sense of physics recognition, Holmes said.

In addition, factors outside physics classrooms feed into the ways students perceive themselves in science contexts.

“We are up against a lot of socio-cultural dynamics in that internalization,” Holmes said. “But to test short-term approaches within classes, I think we can broaden what it means to identify as a good physicist and to make sure there are self-reflection activities for students to break down the ways in which they are physicists.”