Connecting Course Structures for Collaboration to Students' Epistemological, Ability and Belonging Beliefs

Course structures (including curriculum materials, course activities, and grading policies) shape students' learning experiences as well as their beliefs about learning and themselves as learners. Existing research tends to focus on the impact of a single course structure on a single learning belief, and while isolating these individual effects for study is valuable, this approach fails to capture possible influences among multiple learning beliefs or consider whether the belief messages of multiple course structures are aligned or not. Building on the previous talk, we focus on collaboration as a nexus practice linking multiple course structures and students' epistemological, ability, and belonging beliefs. From interviews with introductory physics students, we report themes in students' accounts of how course structures impact their collaborative experience and beliefs. This work is part of a larger effort to provide design principles for the development of new collaborative activities that develop multiple student beliefs and explain why existing collaborative activities succeed or fail in fostering students' learning-relevant beliefs.