Dissertations In Physics Education
Dissertations by former PER@C graduate students:
Wendy Adams, 2007
The purpose of my research was to produce a problem solving evaluation tool for physics. To do this it was necessary to gain a thorough understanding of how students solve problems. Although physics educators highly value problem solving and have put extensive effort into understanding successful problem solving, there is currently no efficient way to evaluate problem solving skill. Attempts have been made in the past; however, knowledge of the principles required to solve the subject problem are so absolutely critical that they completely overshadow any other skills students may use when solving a problem. The work presented here is unique because the evaluation tool removes the requirement that the student already have a grasp of physics concepts. It is also unique because I picked a wide range of people and picked a wide range of tasks for evaluation. This is an important design feature that helps make things emerge more clearly.
This dissertation includes an extensive literature review of problem solving in physics, math, education and cognitive science as well as descriptions of studies involving student use of interactive computer simulations, the design and validation of a beliefs about physics survey and finally the design of the problem solving evaluation tool. I have successfully developed and validated a problem solving evaluation tool that identifies 44 separate skills (skills) necessary for solving problems. Rigorous validation studies, including work with an independent interviewer, show these skills identified by this content-free evaluation tool are the same skills that students use to solve problems in mechanics and quantum mechanics. Understanding this set of component skills will help teachers and researchers address problem solving within the classroom.
Pat Kohl , 2007
Towards an Understanding of Student Use of Representations In Physics Problem Solving
Skill with different representations and multiple representations is highly valued in physics, and prior work has shown that novice physics students can struggle with the representations typically used in solving physics problems. There exists work in PER examining student use of representations and multiple representations, but there have been no comprehensive attempts to understand what factors influence how introductory students succeed or fail in using representations in physics. This thesis is such an attempt, and is organized around four main goals and results. First, we establish that representation is a major factor in student performance, and uncover some of the mechanisms by which representation can affect performance, including representation-dependent cueing. Second, we study the effect of different instructional environments on student learning of multiple representation use during problem solving, and find that courses that are rich in representations can have significant impacts on student skills. Third, we evaluate the role of meta- representational skills in solving physics problems at the introductory level, and find that the meta-representational abilities that we test for in our studies are poorly developed in introductory students. Fourth, we characterize the differences in representation use between expert and novice physics problem solvers, and note that the major differences appear not to lie in whether representations are used, but in how they are used.
With these results in hand, we introduce a model of student use of representations during physics problem solving. This model consists of a set of practical heuristics plus an analysis framework adapted from cultural-constructivist theory. We demonstrate that this model can be useful in understanding and synthesizing our results, and we discuss the instructional implications of our findings.
NOah Podolefsky, 2008
Analogical Scaffolding: Making Meaning in Physics through Representations and Analysis
This work reviews the literature on analogy, introduces a new model of analogy, and presents a series of experiments that test and confirm the utility of this model to describe and predict student learning in physics with analogy. Pilot studies demonstrate that representations (e.g., diagrams) can play a key role in students’ use of analogy. A new model of analogy, Analogical Scaffolding, is developed to explain these initial empirical results. This model will be described in detail, and then applied to describe and predict the outcomes of further experiments. Two large-scale (N>100) studies will demonstrate that: (1) students taught with analogies, according to the Analogical Scaffolding model, outperform students taught without analogies on pre- post assessments focused on electromagnetic waves; (2) the representational forms used to teach with analogy can play a significant role in student learning, with students in one treatment group outperforming students in other treatment groups by factors of two or three. It will be demonstrated that Analogical Scaffolding can be used to predict these results, as well as finer-grained results such as the types of distracters students choose in different treatment groups, and to describe and analyze student reasoning in interviews. Abstraction in physics is reconsidered using Analogical Scaffolding. An operational definition of abstraction is developed within the Analogical Scaffolding framework and employed to explain (a) why physicists consider some ideas more abstract than others in physics, and (b) how students conceptions of these ideas can be modeled. This new approach to abstraction suggests novel approaches to curriculum design in physics using Analogical Scaffolding.