Network lexical analysis of student integration of music and physics knowledge
Abstract
Introductory physics students benefit from learning to integrate new physics knowledge with prior knowledge related to their interests. Writing assignments that offer high epistemic agency can foster this integration, and provide rich artifacts for qualitative analysis. Physics education researchers are increasingly interested in studying such artifacts using computer-based textual analysis. In this paper, we use lexical methods to look for evidence of knowledge integration in written assignments from a Physics of Music course. These assignments require students to communicate to an external audience a clear and cohesive narrative that synthesizes concepts from music and physics. To apply this methodology, we first establish a lexicon of music, physics, and integrated keywords that 10 students used across 6 writing assignments. Then, we visualize this word usage in a series of network diagrams based on which keywords were used in proximity to each other in each assignment. We find that students most strongly connected ideas from music and physics using keywords related to the physical structure of sound (sound, frequency, and wave). Applying these methods to each assignment prompt and its resulting student submissions, we find that, in assignments with a lower degree of epistemic agency (assessed qualitatively by our experience teaching the course), students primarily followed the example of integration modeled by the assignment prompt, but in assignments with a higher degree of epistemic agency, they explored music-physics integration to a greater degree. We use this analysis to offer a pedagogical contribution to introductory physics courses centered around students' interests, a theoretical contribution by illustrating a means of quantifying epistemic agency, and a methodological contribution that complements textual analysis and offers the scalability sought in such approaches.
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BibTeX
@misc{lane2026network,
title = {{Network lexical analysis of student integration of music and physics knowledge}},
author = {W. Brian Lane and Emily E. Pipkin},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.28100},
eprint = {2609.28100},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28100},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Network lexical analysis of student integration of music and physics knowledge
AU - W. Brian Lane
AU - Emily E. Pipkin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.28100
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28100
AB - Introductory physics students benefit from learning to integrate new physics knowledge with prior knowledge related to their interests. Writing assignments that offer high epistemic agency can foster this integration, and provide rich artifacts for qualitative analysis. Physics education researchers are increasingly interested in studying such artifacts using computer-based textual analysis. In this paper, we use lexical methods to look for evidence of knowledge integration in written assignments from a Physics of Music course. These assignments require students to communicate to an external audience a clear and cohesive narrative that synthesizes concepts from music and physics. To apply this methodology, we first establish a lexicon of music, physics, and integrated keywords that 10 students used across 6 writing assignments. Then, we visualize this word usage in a series of network diagrams based on which keywords were used in proximity to each other in each assignment. We find that students most strongly connected ideas from music and physics using keywords related to the physical structure of sound (sound, frequency, and wave). Applying these methods to each assignment prompt and its resulting student submissions, we find that, in assignments with a lower degree of epistemic agency (assessed qualitatively by our experience teaching the course), students primarily followed the example of integration modeled by the assignment prompt, but in assignments with a higher degree of epistemic agency, they explored music-physics integration to a greater degree. We use this analysis to offer a pedagogical contribution to introductory physics courses centered around students' interests, a theoretical contribution by illustrating a means of quantifying epistemic agency, and a methodological contribution that complements textual analysis and offers the scalability sought in such approaches.
ER -