Cultural resources in physics sensemaking: what students reveal through formative assessment

Physics education often omits students whose cultural experiences are not reflected in traditional instruction and assessment practices.While culture-based pedagogies (CBP) have shown promise in making physics more inclusive to diverse learners, limited research has explored how students use their cultural resources to make sense of physics concepts.Additionally, there is limited research on understanding how teachers can identify and effectively leverage these resources.This pilot study examines how undergraduate students from two universities in a general physics 2 class respond to qualitative, open-ended formative assessments intentionally designed to elicit culturally grounded explanations of select physics phenomena related to capacitance, electric field, and power.We examined (1) what cultural resources students draw upon and (2) how these resources support their epistemologies and physics sensemaking.Two analytical frameworks were used to examine student responses: one identifying cultural resources (i.e., personal narratives, community practices, and cultural tools), and another capturing epistemological orientations and modeling strategies (i.e., narrative reasoning, everyday analogies, and gesture-based modeling).Students responded to prompts related to capacitance, electric fields, and energy, using examples from lived experience to interpret phenomena.Findings show that students frequently drew on everyday analogies, personal narratives, and cultural tools to explain physical concepts.Their reasoning reflected diverse epistemologies, including experiential, relational, and narrative modes, that go beyond standard mechanistic or authority-based explanations.Co-occurring codes revealed rich intersections between cultural and epistemic resources, suggesting that students actively integrate their life-world knowledge into physics modeling and sensemaking.This study demonstrates the potential of developing formative assessments to reveal the full range of students' intellectual resources.Implications include new directions for enhancing assessment approaches in physics education that center on broadening learners' participation and valuing students' cultural knowledge as fundamental to learning.