Assessment of Student Problem Solving Processes

Some years ago I visited the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and was astonished by the simplicity of the devices that Maxwell and Thomson had used to make their fundamental discoveries. Back in Brazil, I decided to start a project to present physics to laypeople through demonstrations using simple materials that had been thrown away as refuse. I also encouraged the undergraduates on my introductory university physics courses – the maths, physics and chemistry teachers of the future – to produce simple demonstrations to explain the physics of everyday life.

We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student’s difficulties were epistemological in nature. Our primary goals are to show instructors and curriculum developers that a student’s personal epistemological stance—her ideas about knowledge and learning—can have a direct, causal influence on her learning of physics, and to describe a mechanism for this interaction. This influence exists even when research-based curriculum materials provide implicit epistemological support. For this reason, curriculum materials and teaching techniques could become more effective by explicitly attending to students’ epistemologies.

We have investigated the probabilities of earning high (top-quartile) and low (bottom-quartile) course grades in introductory university physics courses for students in two different groups: one, those who scored in the top quartile of their class on one of three diagnostic pretests, and the other composed of those who scored in the bottom quartile on the same test. The tests employed were the Force Concept Inventory (a physics concept test), the Lawson Test of Scientific Reasoning, and a newly developed mathematics test that includes only pre-college mathematics questions; all pretests were administered before or near the beginning of the course. Our investigation includes over 2000 students enrolled in 31 introductory physics classes taught by eight instructors at four universities. We found with 97% consistency that top-quartile scorers on any of the pretests were more likely to get high (top-quartile) grades and less likely to get low (bottom-quartile) grades than were bottom-quartile scorers on the same pretest. Top-quartile scorers on the pretests were, on average, four to six times as likely to receive high grades, and one-third to one-fifth as likely to receive low grades, compared to bottom-quartile scorers on the same pretests. These results are consistent with mathematical models of empirical data published by Salehi et al. [Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 15(2), 020114 (2019)] and with their cautions regarding the potentially serious implications of these findings for the careers of poorly prepared college physics students.

A common lab exercise in the introductory college physics course employs a low-friction cart and associated track to study the validity of Newton's second law. Yet for college students, especially those who have already encountered a good high school physics course, the exercise must seem a little pointless. These students have already learned to accept Newton's laws without question, and any experimental data that contradict the second law would immediately alert students to an error in procedure or analysis, or, worse, reinforce the widely held opinion that simple laws are inadequate to explain the behavior of “real” systems. A better approach is to ask students to apply their understanding of Newton's laws to determine one or more unknowns inherent in the laboratory apparatus. We illustrate this approach in the experiment described below: a small amount of complexity is added to a standard experimental exercise, forcing a careful analysis of the collected data and yielding very accurate results plus a thorough understanding of the physical system under study. If development of experimental skills is one of the primary goals of the introductory laboratory, then the strategy illustrated below might be widely adaptable and appropriate in laboratories throughout the introductory mechanics curriculum.

Waves and their applications are one of the disciplinary core ideas in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), but the performance expectations include concepts that have not historically been an important part of teaching waves in high school science classrooms, with a particular focus on technologies that utilize waves and on students making connections between different types of waves including sound, seismic waves, and electromagnetic waves. In this talk, I will share resources and strategies that I use to teach some of these concepts, including both hands-on activities and digital resources. Many of these resources are also appropriate to other physics courses, including AP Physics and introductory college physics courses.

Introductory university physics courses often face the dual challenge of introducing students to new physics concepts while also addressing their preconceived notions that conflict with scientific principles. Active learning pedagogical approaches, which employ constructivist principles and emphasize active participation in the learning process, have been shown to be effective in teaching complex physics concepts. However, while the behavioral effects of constructivist methodologies are largely understood, the neurobiological underpinnings that facilitate this process remain unclear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we assessed students enrolled in either an active learning or lecture-based physics course before and after a 15-week semester of learning and examined changes in hippocampal whole-brain connectivity. We focused on the hippocampus given its critical role in learning and memory. Our findings revealed that hippocampal connectivity with brain regions in the frontal and parietal lobes decreased over time, regardless of instructional approach. Results also indicated that active learning students exhibited increased hippocampal connectivity with parietal, cerebellar, and frontal regions, reflecting experiential learning based on constructivist principles, whereas lecture-based students exhibited increased hippocampal connectivity with the fusiform gyrus, suggesting learning through passive observation. Our findings demonstrate that while some aspects of hippocampal functional connectivity may decrease over time, active vs. passive learning may preferentially enhance hippocampal connectivity during physics learning.

The failure of our educational system to produce as many physicists as are required for the national welfare challenges us to re-examine our introductory college physics courses. If one accepts the tenable idea that physics is a research activity, rather than a body of knowledge, he finds much to criticize in the aims and methods of these courses. Some changes which might help to remedy the faults of the traditional course are proposed and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Greater emphasis on the encouragement of independent thought is urged.

Inspired by the recent paper1 in The Physics Teacher on the dynamics of vehicle rollovers, we modeled “rollover” in a laboratory experiment. The combination of fundamental physical principles, application to a “real world” problem, and ease of doing the experiment with readily available material and equipment makes the experiment an attractive one for use in a high school or introductory college physics course. A suggested method, sample results, and suggestions for further experimentation follow.

We previously reported on the success of a psychological intervention implemented to reduce gender differences in achievement in an introductory college physics course. In this prior study, we found that the gender gap on exams and the FMCE among students who completed two 15-minute self-affirmation writing exercises was significantly reduced compared to the gender gap among students who completed neutral writing exercises. In a follow-up study we replicated the self-affirmation intervention in a later semester of the same course, with the same instructor. In this paper, we report the details and preliminary results of the replication study, where we find similar patterns along exams and course grades, but do not observe these patterns along the FMCE. We begin to investigate the critical features of replicating educational interventions, finding that replicating educational interventions is challenging, complex, and involves potentially subtle factors, some of which we explore and others that require further research.

An energy process can be represented by verbal, pictorial, bar chart, and mathematical representations. This multiple-representation technique has been introduced and used in the work-energy part of introductory college physics courses. Assessment indicates that the work-energy bar charts, as a physical representation of a work-energy process, play an important role in student problem solving: they help students 1) reason about work-energy problems conceptually first, 2) set up the generalized work-energy equation correctly and easily, and 3) make inferences and evaluate their problem solutions. One important goal of this investigation is to provide a research base for the design of instruction to help students develop expertise in solving work-energy problems.

Both total and differential cross sections for the reflection of light beams off finite solid surfaces obtained by the rotation of a generic derivable convex function are presented. The calculations are developed using elementary notions of mathematics and are therefore suitable for introductory undergraduate university physics courses. Three particular cases are discussed as examples of the general procedure and of the possible considerations about cross sections in general and the physical properties of specific systems.

Smartphone' acceleration sensors have got useful applications in standard physical situations. We have taken advantage of its capabilities in a number of Physics experiments and perform them in a series of examples within classical mechanical and kinematic situations such as free and damped oscillations due to Earth's gravity. By properly connecting the smartphones other data may be collected and situations studied such as rotational motion. These experiences have been carried out at the Higher Technical School of Design Engineering (ETSID in Spanish) of the Universität Politècnica of Valencia (Spain) and through these examples students learn amenable applications of the capabilities of their smartphones, that facilitate their interest and motivation in introductory and first-year university Physics courses.

Instructors of introductory college physics courses are in a unique position to explain the physics of skateboarding and its associated risks. A field trip to a skate park to explore the law of conservation of energy and measure the impact forces can enhance student analytical thinking skills and their appreciation of physics in everyday life. Through the measurement of the impact forces and student discussions of their own skateboarding experiences, students are better prepared to protect themselves from skateboarding-related physical injuries.

We compared students' self-reported perception of learning with their actual learning under controlled conditions in large-enrollment introductory college physics courses taught using 1) active instruction (following best practices in the discipline) and 2) passive instruction (lectures by experienced and highly rated instructors). Both groups received identical class content and handouts, students were randomly assigned, and the instructor made no effort to persuade students of the benefit of either method. Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments. This suggests that attempts to evaluate instruction based on students' perceptions of learning could inadvertently promote inferior (passive) pedagogical methods. For instance, a superstar lecturer could create such a positive feeling of learning that students would choose those lectures over active learning. Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning. That disconnect may have a detrimental effect on students' motivation, engagement, and ability to self-regulate their own learning. Although students can, on their own, discover the increased value of being actively engaged during a semester-long course, their learning may be impaired during the initial part of the course. We discuss strategies that instructors can use, early in the semester, to improve students' response to being actively engaged in the classroom.

In this article, we present several modifications to the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics. The most significant changes are (i) the addition and removal of items to achieve parallelism in the objectives (dimensions) of the test, thus allowing comparisons of students' performance that were not possible with the original version, and (ii) changes to the distractors of some of the original items that represent the most frequent alternative conceptions. The final modified version (after an iterative process involving four administrations of test variations over two years) was administered to 471 students of an introductory university physics course at a large private university in Mexico. When analyzing the final modified version of the test it was found that the added items satisfied the statistical tests of difficulty, discriminatory power, and reliability; also, that the great majority of the modified distractors were effective in terms of their frequency selection and discriminatory power; and, that the final modified version of the test satisfied the reliability and discriminatory power criteria as well as the original test. Here, we also show the use of the new version of the test, presenting a new analysis of students' understanding not possible to do before with the original version of the test, specifically regarding the objectives and items that in the new version meet parallelisms. Finally, in the PhysPort project (physport.org), we present the final modified version of the test. It can be used by teachers and researchers to assess students' understanding of graphs in kinematics, as well as their learning about them. © 2017 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.