Comparing introductory physics and astronomy students’ attitudes and approaches to problem solving

Good, Melanie; Mason, Andrew J.; Singh, Chandralekha

doi:10.1088/1361-6404/aae35b

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…It is designed to connect students' real-life experiences to conceptual topics involving charging conductors and insulators. It attempts to scaffold their learning by using examples in different contexts that students will find engaging and interesting [91][92][93][94][95].…”

Section: Introduction and Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating and Improving Student Understanding of Conductors and Insulators

et al. 2023

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Concepts involving conductors and insulators are challenging at all levels of instruction. Here, we summarized an investigation of the difficulties that introductory students have pertaining to the charging of conductors and insulators and how that research was used as a resource to develop, validate, and evaluate a conceptual tutorial on this challenging topic. The tutorial uses guided inquiry-based teaching–learning sequences and focuses on helping students develop conceptual understanding of charging conductors and insulators using concrete examples. At a large university in the US, we first evaluated whether there was any statistically significant difference on the pretest (before college instruction) between the performance of students who had any high school physics instruction and those who did not on relevant questions. Then, we compared the performance of introductory physics students in the experimental group who engaged with the tutorial and the control group who did not engage with the tutorial and only had traditional, lecture-based instruction. Our analysis shows large improvements from pre- to post-tests (i.e., from before to after instruction) for the tutorial group and large gaps in post-test scores between the nontutorial and tutorial groups.

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Section: Introduction and Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating and Improving Student Understanding of Conductors and Insulators

et al. 2023

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“…Helping students learn physics concepts and assisting in the development of students' problem solving skills are some of the common instructional goals of introductory physics courses [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Effective physics problem solving can be described in terms of attitudes and approaches used by physics experts, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Additional unexpected benefits of rewarding students for effective problem solving strategies: supporting gender equity in physics

Good

Maries²,

Singh³

2022

Phys. Educ.

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An important goal of introductory physics courses is to encourage effective approaches to problem solving. To achieve this goal, many aspects of desired problem solving approach should be rewarded, e.g. via grade incentives rather than basing grades mainly or solely on correct final answers. Here we discuss findings of a study that suggests that shifting pedagogical emphasis to reward the process of problem solving approach rather than basing the grade primarily on the final answer may have an additional unexpected benefit of supporting gender equity in physics. Our study involves administering a previously-validated attitudes and approaches to problem solving (AAPS) survey in six large enrollment calculus-based introductory physics classes at a large research university in the United States. On average, women had a statistically significantly higher average AAPS score at the end of the instruction when compared with men. Moreover, on clusters of questions related to effective approaches to problem solving such as drawing diagrams and doing scratchwork, women had a significantly higher average score. Since drawing and scratchwork are part of a systematic approach to physics problem-solving, this finding suggests that women, on average, may take a more favourable approach to physics problem-solving when compared with men. Interview data with a subset of students corroborate this interpretation. Our findings suggest that awarding appropriate credit to the entire problem solving process, e.g. by giving credit for drawings and scratchwork, may support gender equity in physics. In particular, heavier reliance on open-ended questions on assessments, along with grading rubrics that are sensitive to the details of the problem-solving process, not only rewards the desired approaches to problem solving, but also supports gender equity since women are rewarded appropriately for their work. We encourage physics instructors to adopt instructional strategies that reward the problem solving process instead of only rewarding the product to ensure that students learn effective problem solving skills while also supporting a practice that is more equitable.

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confidence: 99%

Beyond the magnetic field of a finite wire: a teaching approach using the superposition principle

García-Farieta,

Márquez

2020

Preprint

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The traditional lecture-based scheme of teaching physics have shown to be ineffective in several aspects [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. It results in a lack of motivation, with low impact on students, to address more complex physical systems than the ones presented in textbooks. A clear example in university-level education is the electromagnetics course, in particular when the magnetic field concept is introduced [8-10].Empirical laws of magnetism are usually discussed after a phenomenological description of the magnetic interaction and its relation with electric currents as magnetic sources. The textbooks show in that section how to apply the Biot-Savart law to evaluate the magnetic field in any point in space due to a little element of a current-carrying wire of arbitrary shape. Then, it is exemplified considering a straight finite wire and evaluating the magnetic field B at a specific point, however, it involves several assumptions, which make the problem easy to solve, but which are not discussed in detail, such as: i) choosing a symmetry point to evaluate B; ii) applying the superposition principle to simplify vector operations; and iii) reducing the number of dimensions of the system, from 3D to 2D or 1D. Even if it can be justified, it makes difficult for students to solve some of the exercises proposed at the end of the textbook section, that aim to explore the magnetic field of more complex systems like an

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Comparing introductory physics and astronomy students’ attitudes and approaches to problem solving

Cited by 5 publications

References 44 publications

Investigating and Improving Student Understanding of Conductors and Insulators

Investigating and Improving Student Understanding of Conductors and Insulators

Additional unexpected benefits of rewarding students for effective problem solving strategies: supporting gender equity in physics

Beyond the magnetic field of a finite wire: a teaching approach using the superposition principle

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