Supporting and sustaining the holistic development of students into practicing physicists

This PERC workshop leveraged the broad expertise inherent in the PERC community to begin structuring a research agenda that might guide future efforts to support the holistic development of students into practicing physicists. In small groups, participants identified and discussed those concepts, habits of mind, skills, and representations that thread through the sub-disciplines of upper-division physics. Then separate small groups and later the whole group discussed the following questions: 1) What are the characteristics of curricula that scaffold student acquisition of these concepts, habits of mind, skills, and representations throughout the upper-division? 2) What aspects of institutional culture might facilitate the development, support, and sustainability of these curricula? 3) What models of research are currently available to address the questions above and where are new models needed? The conclusions of this workshop are summarized here for the benefit of the entire community.