Identifying and addressing student difficulties with hydrostatic pressure

Abstract

We describe an investigation of student learning of the concept of pressure in a static liquid. We document patterns of student answers and explanations in response to written and interview questions. We find that many undergraduate students fail to develop a correct understanding of pressure in this context. Many students have difficulty identifying the forces that act on a liquid and relating these forces to pressure. We describe the development and assessment of research-based instructional materials designed to address student difficulties with pressure and provide evidence that these materials can improve student understanding.

Using the resources framework to design, assess, and refine interventions on pressure in fluids

“…A series of studies by the University of Washington Physics Education Group focused on student understanding of static fluids and related topics: the ideal gas law [26,27] and volume of an ideal gas [28], buoyancy [2,3,29], and hydrostatic pressure [4]. While buoyancy was not directly applicable to our work, the ideal gas studies informed our perspective on microscopic versus macroscopic approaches (detailed in the next section), and tutorial development (Sec.…”

“…Loverude et al [4] then developed an instructional sequence in which students practiced making free body diagrams and analyzing forces for several systems at rest, being sure to include both contact forces and gravity. Post-test results indicated that students' reasoning about static fluids significantly improved; more than 80% of the students who had completed the tutorial answered correctly on problems dealing with identifying pressure in a static fluid with correct reasoning.…”

“…The misconceptions perspective is a framework used in designing activities, and focuses on carefully delineating student misconceptions and difficulties and employing elicit-confront-resolve strategies in the development of the interventions; curricula are assessed using pre-and postconceptual tests [2][3][4]. One concern with this approach is that the elicit-confront-resolve approach sends the undesirable epistemological message that students' everyday experiences are not valuable in the physics classroom [5] (p. 633).…”

Teaching Fluids to IPLS Students from a Microscopic Viewpoint

“…Notably, they found that students' difficulties with Newton's second law negatively impact their ability to understand hydrostatics. Similarly, Kautz et al [3] investigated student understanding of the ideal gas law and found that many of the student difficulties that were identified at the macroscopic level seemed to be rooted in incorrect or incomplete microscopic models of gases.…”

A Tutorial Worksheet to Help Students Develop the Ability to Interpret the Dot Product as a Projection

“…During the class session in which the tutorial worksheet is presented, students work collaboratively in groups of three or four. It is worth noting that the tutorials have been considered elsewhere as a reference to design new instructional material (for example, Wittmann, Steinberg & Redish, 2003;Loverude, Heron, & Kautz, 2009) and that this journal has published articles that present new instructional materials that, as the tutorials, foster students' active learning (Tandogan & Orhan, 2007;Bilgin, Senocak, & Sozbilir, 2009).…”