Abstract. A scaffolded metacognition activity was incorporated into the laboratory component of the introductory physics course at Western Washington University (WWU) and Whatcom Community College (WCC). Each week, students wrote reflectively to contrast their initial and current understanding of a specific physics topic, and described the "trigger" events that led them to change their thinking. Goals were to enhance conceptual understanding as well as the depth and quality of student reflection. A coding scheme was developed to evaluate student reflections. We present the scaffolded activity and coding scheme, as well as preliminary findings about changes in student reflection over time and correlations between amount of reflection and conceptual learning.
Many students tend to provide intuitively appealing (but incorrect) responses to some physics questions despite demonstrating (on isomorphic questions) the formal knowledge necessary to reason correctly. These inconsistencies in reasoning are persistent and remain even after evidence-based instruction. This project probed whether a collaborative group exam could serve not only as an innovative assessment tool but also as an instructional intervention that helps address persistent reasoning difficulties. Specifically, students were given opportunities to revisit their answers to questions known to elicit intuitively appealing responses in a collaborative group exam component immediately following a traditional individual exam. The efficacy of this approach was compared to that of a more traditional instructor-led exam review session. Both approaches yielded moderate improvements in performance on the final exam. However, additional multi-faceted data analysis provided further insights into student reasoning difficulties that suggested further implication for instruction and research.
Professional development is an effective way to diffuse evidence-based instructional practices and support their implementation. At the same time, assessing the impacts of professional development opportunities in physics education is still an emerging field. In this paper, we examine the efficacy of an assessment instrument based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, a theoretical framework originating from psychology. The theory has been used in other fields to understand and predict behaviors, but it has not been utilized in STEM Education research. The theory posits that participants' attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioral control beliefs toward a particular behavior (e.g., implementation of active learning) predict intentions which, in turn, determine and explain that behavior. Previous work presented empirical data that show that a link exists between intentions (as measured by the instrument) and adoption of active learning strategies (as measured by the COPUS observation protocol). In this paper, we focus on examining evidence for the validity and reliability of measurements produced by the instrument, which is necessary to provide further validity evidence to the empirical results of the prior study. We also discuss the retrospective pre-test methodology for data collection which helps minimize the effects of biases associated with self-reported data collected via traditional pre-post survey administrations. We used Arjoon, Xu, and Lewis's framework for validity and provide evidence for the reliability, internal structure, and temporal stability of our measures. We will also compare results from our instrument to those obtained using the Approaches to Teaching Inventory.
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