Empathy in Practice: Applying the Two-Pathway Physics Empathy Framework

We present a two-pathway framework for faculty empathy — the ability to understand and resonate with anothers' internal state — and demonstrate its applicability to datasets from a variety of educational contexts. The framework explicitly raises mediators and moderators for both cognitive empathy, a deliberate process that requires significant cognitive effort, and affective empathy, a quick, instinctive response that arises from a shared experience. Applying the empathetic framework provides a new lens to understanding faculty-student interactions and the new interpretation gives valuable additional information about relationships that are critical to students' success. By applying our work to a wide variety of data we demonstrate the flexibility and adaptability of the two-pathway empathy model and give concrete examples of how researchers and practitioners can apply it in practice.