How Physics Students Develop Disciplinary Computational Literacy

Abstract: Computation has revolutionized science and is gradually making its way into science teaching and learning. However, we currently lack theoretical frameworks to make sense of how students learn to use computation as a disciplinary tool. In this study, we propose disciplinary computational literacy as a productive theoretical lens on this subject. This theoretical perspective views computation as a new type of literacy consisting of material, cognitive, and social elements. We argue that these elements will necessarily vary by discipline and use case studies of two pairs of students writing computational essays in an intermediate physics course to examine how disciplinary computational literacy looks and is built at an undergraduate level. Through these case studies we see the pairs leveraging the different elements of their computational literacy to both engage with and produce computational literature in their discipline, while also engaging in a process of epistemic negotiation between their interests, the course goals, available tools, and their basis of computational literacy. These cases show how computational literacy can highlight the ways in which scientific computing helps students build disciplinary understanding and also shows that computational essays, as a genre of computational literature, are a useful epistemic form for developing computational literacy.