Interactive remote interviews during emergency remote teaching

The COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting in-person research a health risk for interviewers and participants. Near the start of the pandemic, many universities pivoted to emergency remote teaching where courses were delivered remotely in observance of safety guidelines. The safety guidelines also necessitated that research be done remotely. We designed a remote interview protocol for a computational physics based qualitative interview. Using Zoom’s features, we created an interview that allowed participants many modes of interacting with the interviewer and the interview task materials. We present the interview methods and evaluate the utility of remote interviews. We then generalize the experiences from designing and conducting remote interviews for contexts outside of computational physics and describe how task design choices were influenced by technology. We find that conducting interactive remote interviews can be an effective method for physics education researchers even outside of the pandemic.

Figure 1

Participant F used screen annotation to draw on a plot with probability density on the vertical axis and position on the horizontal axis to enhance their explanation of the role of the size of $dx$ in a Riemann sum. The plot shows a wave function (blue) and the approximation of the wave function (blue), the ninth energy-eigenstate term of the approximation (green), and the participants Riemann sum annotation (red).

Figure 2

An image of the screen of the interviewer’s desktop where participant C arranged the windows to make comparisons between plots. On the left-hand side of the image is the code participants used during the code manipulation task. The top plots display the wave function (blue) and wave function approximation (orange) with probability density on the vertical axis and position on the horizontal axis. The bottom plots display $c_n$ on the vertical axis and $n$ on the horizontal axis. The plots on the left have $dx$ set to 0.25 (the initial value) and the plots on the right have $dx$ set to 0.01.

Figure 3

An example of a pseudo-code for calculating the area of a rectangle. This function takes in two inputs—a length and a width. It multiplies the length by the width and stores that as the area, which the function outputs.

Figure 4

The wave function of a particle in a box and an approximation up to the first 10 terms in an energy eigenstate of that wave function with probability density on the vertical axis and position on the horizontal axis.

Figure 5

The inner product of the wave function and an energy eigenstate of a particle in a box, with $c_n$ on the vertical axis and the energy level labeled on the horizontal axis.