Exploring How Students Construct Collaborative Thought Experiments During Physics Problem-Solving Activities

Investigating the Purposes of Thought Experiments: Based on the Students’ Performance

“…The findings revealed that given the context of collaborative problem-solving activities, students could design, discuss, share opinions, rethink, and review their TEs, which signifies that the TEs can be established and directed together even though they initially appear in personalized versions. Furthermore, the study also showed that in the process of evaluating the results of TEs, students employed four sources of evaluation, namely conceptual understanding, past-daily experience, logical reasoning, and conceptual-logical inference (Bancong & Song, 2020b). This study, therefore, is a follow up to the previous one.…”

“…He argued that "(empirical) TEs without REs are empty; REs without TEs are blind" (Buzzoni, 2013, p. 100). TEs are thought and experimental activities (Galili, 2009;Bancong & Song, 2020b). Thought activities refer to modeling the imaginary worlds related to daily experiences of the experimenter and the scientific theories, while experiment activities refer to experimental activities in the laboratory, such as manipulating objects, variables, and making observations.…”

“…Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the purposes of students in doing TEs. In our previous study (Bancong & Song, 2020b), we had explored the processes of TEs carried out by students when they were working collaboratively to solve physics problems provided. The findings revealed that given the context of collaborative problem-solving activities, students could design, discuss, share opinions, rethink, and review their TEs, which signifies that the TEs can be established and directed together even though they initially appear in personalized versions.…”

Modeling a Theoretical Construct on Pupils’ Difficulties in Problem Solving

“…Even in apparent basic phenomena, such as Hooke's law, there are simultaneous complex causal models which, according to Perkins and Grotzer (2005), are related to four categories-mechanism, interaction pattern, probability, and agency. Recently, problem-solving experiments in Physics in collaborative groups of students, show that students design, share, rethink, and evaluate their thought experiments, highlighting the importance of conceptual understanding, past-daily experience, logical reasoning, and conceptual-logical inference (Bancong & Song, 2020). This could explain the close relationship we found between the variables of the model and the error covariances: Memory (Me) as an obstacle binder, which would imply the redesign of problems (Cook, 2006), and the improvement of understanding (Un) through shared learning (Co), to facilitate the learning of mental models of Hooke's law and its application (Ap), in our case to Elasticity (Batlolona et al, 2020).Therefore, we sincerely believe that this pupil-centred view can complement other perspectives.…”

Trending Research Topics in the Field of Physics Education from 2017 to 2019 in Highly Reputable International Journals

“…Research on physics education makes a real contribution to physics education in secondary schools as a guideline not only for revising the curriculum, which is the framework for secondary physics education but also for improving the physics teaching and learning process (Bancong & Song, 2018;Chusni & Zakwandi, 2018;Jamali et al, 2015;Meltzer & Otero, 2015;Yusuf & Bancong, 2015). Likewise, at the university level, physics education research is used to develop teaching models and strategies to help university students study physics more effectively (Bancong & Song, 2020;Lee & Kim, 2018;Thompson et al, 2011). This can make a real contribution to improving the competence of physicists and teachers in the future.…”