Developing a Comprehensive Survey of Physics Computational Literacy

Computing is quickly becoming a critical component of the modern physics curriculum; students learn to develop computational models and write programs that represent physical systems, analyze data, and operate laboratory equipment. Physics Computational Literacy (PCL) is an emerging theory that models how different knowledge, practices, and beliefs are drawn on by students in computing-enabled physics learning environments. As part of a new national effort to support integrating computing into physics courses, we aim to design a survey of instructional activities and student perspectives that can illuminate what strategies and approaches might lead to certain forms of PCL development. To do so, we have begun to interview students and faculty to ground our development efforts. In this poster, we report on the overall project to develop the survey, the work to contextualize PCL for the purposes of classroom use, and the preliminary results from interviews with students and faculty.