Probing the Nature of Student Reasoning Using Modified Chaining Tasks

Research-based materials developed by the physics education research community have helped improve student conceptual understanding in introductory physics courses. A growing body of work, however, suggests that poor student performance on certain physics tasks, even after research-based instruction, may result from the nature of student reasoning itself than from conceptual difficulties. Drawing upon dual-process theories of reasoning, it has been argued that some of the poor performance from the presence of salient distracting features (SDFs) in physics problems, which may cue an incorrect first-available mental model and effectively preclude the student from drawing upon relevant knowledge. In this study, we explored the relationship between students\u27 initial impressions of how to approach a given physics problem and their subsequent performance on the problem. We accomplished this by employing a novel two-stage methodology in which students were first given a problem, provided with reasoning elements, and asked to categorize these elements as being useful or not useful for solving the problem. Students were subsequently asked to use these elements to construct a reasoning chain in order to arrive at an answer. Three problems were administered to students in introductory calculus-based physics. We found that there was a relationship between students\u27 sorting of the elements and students\u27 final answers. Specifically, students who initially rejected relevant reasoning elements in favor of elements related to a problem\u27s SDF were more likely to settle upon an incorrect, SDF-cued answer than students who initially endorsed the relevant elements and rejected the SDF-related elements

Student Understanding of Rotational and Rolling Motion Concepts

Provides pedagogical insight concerning learners' pre-conceptions and misconceptions about torque and rolling motion The resource being annotated is: http://www.dlese.org/dds/catalog_DLESE-000-000-006-235.htm

Polarization of physics on global courses

Since October 2010, the Chemistry-Biology Combined Major Program (CBCMP), an international course taught in English at Osaka University, has been teaching small classes (no more than 20 in size). We present data from the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) given to first year classical mechanics students (N=47 students over three years) pre and post score, for a class that predominantly uses interactive engagement (IE), such as MasteringPhysics. Our findings show a $G$-factor improved score of about $\sim$ 0.18, which is marginally about the average of a traditional based course. Furthermore, we analyse in detail a set of six questions from the FCI, involving the identification of forces acting on a body. We find that student answers tend to cluster about "polarising choices"-a pair of choices containing the correct choice and a wrong choice with the latter corresponding to a superset of forces in the former. Our results are suggestive that students have a good idea of the right set of forces acting on a given system but the inclusion of extra force(s) brings about confusion; something that may be explained by misleading ontological categorisation of forces. In an appendix we also comment on possible correlations between the pre/post score and the level of English ability on entry to the course.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 1 table; modified the discussion to focus on polarisation; the discussion on English ability can now be found in the appendix; added reference