Examining Student Reasoning at an HBCU: The Impact of Cultural Relevance

Physics education researchers agree that the field would benefit from investigations conducted with diverse student populations. This project examines physics teaching and student learning at a Historically Black University, thus contributing to a sparse body of research with this underrepresented population. We first presented questions designed to disentangle conceptual understanding, reasoning, and intuition reported in the literature to an HBCU classroom. The "screening" question was intended to probe whether students developed the necessary physics knowledge. The following "target" question required applying the same knowledge in a situation that elicits strongly appealing incorrect intuitive responses. To explore the importance of cultural relevance, the screening and target questions were re-worded to represent a more realistic situation. We compare student performance on the original and re-worded questions and discuss implications of making screening-target pairs more grounded.