Testing alternative explanations for common responses to conceptual questions: An example in the context of center of mass

Abstract

In physics education research it has been common to interpret student errors on conceptual questions in topic-specific ways, rather than in terms of general perceptual or reasoning difficulties. This paper examines two alternative accounts for responses to questions related to the concept of center of mass. In one account, difficulties are said to be perceptual in nature; in the other, difficulties are said to be tightly linked to the concepts in question. Hypotheses derived from the former perspective are tested in studies conducted among university students in introductory physics courses. The results do not provide strong support for the perceptual hypothesis; in fact, there is evidence that performance on perception tasks may be influenced by subjects' ideas about the physical scenario. While the results do not provide general support for one perspective versus the other, the paper serves as an illustration of the type of investigation needed to develop the kind of rich representation of student thinking that will allow instructional resources to be most effectively targeted.

Designing Error Detection Prompts and Peer Feedback for Physics Classrooms

“…Students in the treatment group performed equally to the control group (as seen on the final exam), when presented with "traditional" problem solving questions but, strikingly, when these same treatment-group students were prompted to explain physics to the fictional Pat, they outperformed the control group. This success with the prompted questions is consistent with other research that shows the difficulty students have in regulating their attention, much like the fast and slow dual-cognitive processing being examined by physics education researcher Paula Heron and colleagues [10]. The fact that students, who are so successful when prompted to identify Pat's errors and to mentor him/her correctly, then fail to take their own advice, when unprompted, suggests we still have a lot to investigate about using EDP to support student learning.…”

Probing student reasoning approaches through the lens of dual-process theories: A case study in buoyancy

“…At the same time, researchers identified many contexts in which multiple refinements of instructional materials designed to address conceptual difficulties did not necessarily lead to significant improvements in student performance. A number of recent investigations have revealed that some patterns of persistent incorrect responses may be due to reasoning difficulties rather than to a lack of relevant conceptual understanding [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. In order to help students develop more productive thinking habits in the context of physics (and beyond), it is imperative to direct efforts toward (i) pinpointing more precisely the underlying mechanisms that may lead to observed patterns of student reasoning, both productive and unproductive, and (ii) utilizing the results of this research in order to develop instructional materials designed to enhance student reasoning skills.…”

“…Physics education researchers have begun to use knowledge of implicit (i.e., heuristic) processes in order to identify more precisely factors that impact student reasoning in the context of physics [8,9,14,[22][23][24]. One such process is related to the fluency heuristic, which is linked to processing time and provides the following mechanism for cueing a specific, first-available mental model: the faster an idea is processed, the more "weight" it is given in reasoning [25][26][27].…”

Leveraging dual-process theories of reasoning to understand and support student reasoning

“…Researchers have found that even after instruction using materials demonstrated to improve conceptual understanding of certain topics, some questions remain difficult for students to answer correctly 1 . Investigations of these questions have led researchers to conclude that reasoning processes that are general to all human reasoning are impacting domain-specific reasoning in physics 2 , and that to attain more expert-like performance in physics, instructors need to attend explicitly to helping build cognitive reasoning skills above and beyond pure conceptual understanding 3 .…”