The Physics Program at Chicago State University has been investigating student learning for the past eight years in an effort to construct an effective instructional environment for the urban physics student. In our initial work, the targeted analysis on student content understanding caused us to miss the specific attitudes, thinking, and reasoning skills present in our students. As our research focus began to shift to identifying these other skills, we began to identify specific student resources that foster an active learning environment in the introductory physics course. In addition, we began to uncover a set of coherent, robust content knowledge that we had previously overlooked. Research studies on collaboration in the classroom and work on identifying intuitive and formal reasoning has since provided a rich, complex picture of student understanding and has informed the development of our instructional environment.