Investigating how students collaborate to generate physics problems through structured tasks

Abstract

Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to encourage the socialization of information among group members, we utilized a real-world problem where students were asked to generate a well-structured physics task, and investigated how student groups collaborated to create physics problems for younger students at an introductory physics course at a university in northern Chile. Data collection consists of audio recording the group discussions while they were collaborating to develop their physics problems as well as the solutions they created to their problems. Through interviews, we accessed students' perceptions on the task and its challenges. Results suggest that generating problems is an opportunity for students to propose ideas and make decisions regarding the goals of the problem, concepts and procedures, contextual details and magnitudes and units to introduce in their generated problems. In addition, we found evidence that groups tested the validity of their creations by engaging in strategies often observed with algebra-based physics problems, such as mathematical procedures and qualitative descriptions of the physics embedded in the problem, yet groups invested more time with algebra-based strategies compared to more qualitative descriptions. Students valued the open-ended nature of the task and recognized its benefits in utilizing physics ideas into context, which in turn enabled collaboration in a way not experienced with traditional algebra-based problems. These findings support the use of generative activities as a pathway for students to engage in real-world physics problems that allow for a range and variety of collective processes and ideas.