Students' understanding of what science is about and how it is done and their expectations as to what goes on in a science course play a powerful role in what they can get out of introductory college physics. This is particularly true when there is a large gap between what the students expect to do and what the instructor expects them to do. This paper describes the Maryland Physics Expectations (MPEX) Survey, a 34-item Likert-scale survey that probes student attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about physics. The results of pre-and post-instruction delivery of this survey to 1500 students in introductory calculus-based physics at 6 colleges and universities are presented. Findings indicate a large gap between the expectations of experts and novices and a tendency for student expectations to deteriorate rather than improve as a result of a semester of introductory physics. (Contains 36 references.) (Author/WRM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.Students' understanding of what science is about and how it is done and their expectations as to what goes on in a science course play a powerful role in what they can get out of introductory college physics. This is particularly true when there is a large gap between what the students expect to do and what the instructor expects them to do. In this paper, we describe the Maryland Physics Expectations (MPEX) Survey; a 34item Liken-scale (agree-disagree) survey that probes student attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about physics. We report on the results of pre-and post-instruction delivery of this survey to 1500 students in introductory calculus-based physics at six colleges and universities. We note a large gap between the expectations of experts and novices and observe a tendency for student expectations to deteriorate rather than improve as a result of a semester of introductory physics.

Although much is known about the differences between expert and novice problem solvers, knowledge of those differences typically does not provide enough detail to help instructors understand why some students seem to learn physics while solving problems and others do not. A critical issue is how students access the knowledge they have in the context of solving a particular problem. In this paper, we discuss our observations of students solving physics problems in authentic situations in an algebra-based physics class at the University of Maryland. We find that when these students are working together and interacting effectively, they often use a limited set of locally coherent resources for blocks of time of a few minutes or more. This coherence appears to provide the student with guidance as to what knowledge and procedures to access and what to ignore. Often, this leads to the students failing to apply relevant knowledge they later show they possess. In this paper, we outline a theoretical phenomenology for describing these local coherences and identify six organizational structures that we refer to as epistemic games. The hypothesis that students tend to function within the narrow confines of a fairly limited set of games provides a good description of our observations. We demonstrate how students use these games in two case studies and discuss the implications for instruction.

The purpose of this Resource Letter is to provide an overview of research on the learning and teaching of physics. The references have been selected to meet the needs of two groups of physicists engaged in physics education. The first is the growing number whose field of scholarly inquiry is (or might become) physics education research. The second is the much larger community of physics instructors whose primary interest is in using the results from research as a guide for improving instruction.

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This is a "meta" issue. People build mental models not only for content, but also for how to learn and what actions are appropriate under what circumstances. Most of our students don't know what you and I mean by "doing" science or what we expect them to do. Unfortunately, the most common mental model for learning science in my classes seems to be: