We report on students' thinking regarding entropy in an introductory calculus-based physics course. We analyzed students' responses to a variety of questions on entropy changes of an arbitrarily defined system and its surroundings. In four offerings of the same course we found that before instruction, no more than 6% of all students could give completely correct responses to relevant questions posed in both general and concrete contexts. Nearly two-thirds of the students showed clear evidence of conservation-type reasoning regarding entropy. These outcomes were little changed even after instruction. Targeted instruction that guided students to recognize that entropy is not a conserved quantity appears to yield improved performance on qualitative questions related to this concept. Disciplines Physics | Scholarship of Teaching and Learning CommentsThis article is from American Journal of Physics 77 (2009) We report on students' thinking regarding entropy in an introductory calculus-based physics course. We analyzed students' responses to a variety of questions on entropy changes of an arbitrarily defined system and its surroundings. In four offerings of the same course we found that before instruction, no more than 6% of all students could give completely correct responses to relevant questions posed in both general and concrete contexts. Nearly two-thirds of the students showed clear evidence of conservation-type reasoning regarding entropy. These outcomes were little changed even after instruction. Targeted instruction that guided students to recognize that entropy is not a conserved quantity appears to yield improved performance on qualitative questions related to this concept.

Most students struggle when faced with complex and open-ended tasks because the strategies taught in schools and universities simply require finding and applying the correct formulae or strategy to answer well-structured, algorithmic problems. For students to develop their ability to solve ill-structured problems, they must first believe that standardized procedural approaches will not always be sufficient for solving engineering and scientific challenges. In this paper we document the range of beliefs university students have about problem solving. Students enrolled in a physics course submitted a written reflection both at the start and the end of the course on how they solve problems. We coded approximately 500 of these reflections for the presence of different problem-solving approaches. At the start of the semester over 50% of the students mention in written reflections that they use Rolodex equation matching, i.e., they solve problems by searching for equations that have the same variables as the knowns and unknowns. We then describe the extent to which students’ beliefs about physics problem solving change by the end of a semester-long course that emphasized problem solving via context-rich, multifaceted problems. The frequency of strategies such as the Rolodex method reduces only slightly by the end of the semester. However, there is an increase in students describing more expansive strategies within their reflections. In particular there is a large increase in describing the use of diagrams, and thinking about concepts first

The authors describe how a faculty learning community was leveraged to implement active-learning strategies and improve student learning in a large-enrollment introductory course.

This paper describes the ways that students' problem-solving behaviors evolve when solving multi-faceted, context-rich problems within a web-based learning environment. During the semester, groups of two or three students worked on five physics problems that required drawing on more than one concept and, hence, could not be readily solved with simple "plug-and-chug" strategies. The problems were presented to students in a data-rich, online problem-based learning environment that tracked which information items were selected by students as they attempted to solve the problem. The students also completed a variety of tasks, like entering an initial qualitative analysis of the problem into an online form. Students were not constrained to complete these tasks in any specific order. As they gained more experience in solving context-rich physics problems, student groups showed some progression towards expert-like behavior as they completed qualitative analysis earlier and were more selective in their perusal of informational resources. However, there was room for more improvement as approximately half of the groups still completed the qualitative analysis task towards the end of the problem-solving process rather than at the beginning of the task when it would have been most useful to their work.

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