#562: Cultural Contexts as Catalysts for Learning: Integrating Students’ Lived Experiences into Physics Assessments

This study investigates how leveraging students’ cultural resources can support conceptual understanding in a university-level physics course. Drawing on culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), the resources framework (diSessa, 1993; Hammer et al., 2005), and the cultural resource enactment framework (Mathis, 2025), the research examines how contextualizing motion-graph tasks within students’ lived campus experiences influences reasoning about kinematics. Forty-eight students completed four tasks, each situated in familiar campus settings, that required interpreting, comparing, and generating position-, velocity-, and acceleration-time graphs. Analysis using a four-dimensional rubric revealed that most students demonstrated scientific reasoning when tasks were culturally and spatially grounded, particularly in single-graph interpretation and comparative reasoning. Student reflections indicated that familiar contexts increased engagement and relevance. Findings provide empirical evidence that situating disciplinary ideas in culturally meaningful contexts can enhance both engagement and representational fluency, offering a practical model for culturally grounded assessment design in university physics instruction.