Learning, retention, and forgetting of Newton’s third law throughout university physics

Sayre, Eleanor C.; Dymek, Stephanie; Clark, Jessica; Sun, Yifei

doi:10.1103/physrevstper.8.010116

Cited by 18 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Second, looking for signs of productivity focuses our attention on student thinking and resource activation, and gives us direct insight into how to refine the interventions. Last, the literature gives evidence that we should interpret the results of conceptual surveys with some caution [45,55,56].…”

Section: B Productivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the resources framework to design, assess, and refine interventions on pressure in fluids

Young

Meredith

2017

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res.

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The resources framework provides a useful and generative model of student thinking and learning. In particular, it suggests various strategies for instruction such as priming resources and refining intuition that allow students to build on knowledge they already have. In this paper, we describe the affordances of the resources framework in guiding the design, assessment, and refinement of interventions on pressure in fluids. This perspective kept us alert for cognitive resources on which students could build a deeper understanding and encouraged us to model student thinking as complex and context dependent, even on this narrow topic. This framework also facilitated a focus on evidence of productivity in student work as an alternative assessment to conceptual pre-and post testing.

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Section: B Productivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the resources framework to design, assess, and refine interventions on pressure in fluids

Young

Meredith

2017

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res.

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“…However, they inconsistently apply this belief when there are some variations in the problem scenario, such as the different shaped containers or different amount of fluid beneath the point being considered. This paper is part of a larger study of student thinking across many introductory physics topics [14][15][16], and the data discussed here are taken from validation interviews for an instrument to test students' understanding of Archimedes' principle and Pascal's law. While our claims are grounded in these topics, we believe the AMEG is not unique to them.…”

Section: Hydrostaticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic game for answer making in learning about hydrostatics

Chen

Irving

Sayre

2013

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res.

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Previous research into problem solving in physics resulted in researchers introducing six epistemic games to describe the organizational structures of locally coherent resources. We present a new epistemic game-the ''answer-making epistemic game''-which was identified in this paper through the analysis of interviews carried out to validate a survey focusing on students' understanding of Archimedes' principle and Pascal's law. In the game, the ultimate goal is a solution to a problem posed by the survey. Students may remember or intuit an answer, then use conceptual and/or mathematical reasoning to justify it. Alternately, they may use conceptual and/or mathematical reasoning to generate an answer. We demonstrate how students generate their solutions using these two different paths and discuss some implications for instruction.

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“…Students had five to ten min to complete each quiz, which were sometimes appended to an instructor-generated quiz that was not used for research. Previous analysis suggests that different sections are not statistically significantly different at any given time, 14 and thus these two variants on the RCM are comparable.…”

Section: B Response Curve Methodologymentioning

confidence: 90%

Traditionally taught students learn; actively engaged students remember

Sayre

Clark

2014

American Journal of Physics

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A common narrative in physics education research is that students taught in lecture-based classes learn less than those taught with activity-based reformed methods. We show this narrative is simplistic and misses important dynamics of student learning. In particular, we find students of both methods show equal short-term learning gains on a conceptual question dealing with electric potential. For traditionally taught students, this learning rapidly decays on a time scale of weeks, vanishing by the time of the typical end-of-term post-test. For students in reform-based classes, however, the knowledge is retained and may even be enhanced by subsequent instruction. This difference explains the many previous pre- and post-test studies that have found minimal learning gains in lecture-based courses. Our findings suggest a more nuanced model of student learning, one that is sensitive to time-dependent effects such as forgetting and interference. In addition, the findings suggest that lecture-based courses, by incorporating aspects designed to reinforce student understanding of previously covered topics, might approach the long-term learning found in research-based pedagogies.

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Learning, retention, and forgetting of Newton’s third law throughout university physics

Cited by 18 publications

References 25 publications

Using the resources framework to design, assess, and refine interventions on pressure in fluids

Using the resources framework to design, assess, and refine interventions on pressure in fluids

Epistemic game for answer making in learning about hydrostatics

Traditionally taught students learn; actively engaged students remember

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