Students’ epistemological beliefs, expectations, and learning physics: An international comparison

Abstract

It has been established by physics education researchers that there is a correlation between the learner's behavior, their epistemological beliefs with which they come to the classrooms, and their success in a course. This study of Indian students and teachers explores expectations and beliefs in learning physics at the secondary and tertiary levels by making use of the Maryland Physics Expectation (MPEX) survey, which has been tested for both its validity and its reliability. The MPEX was administered to a sample of 265 Indian students at three different levels of study: (i) XII standard (high school), (ii) undergraduate (Bachelor of Science), and (iii) master's degree (Master of Science in Physics, MS). In India, a pre-post instruction difference between the attitudes of class XII, undergraduate, and master's students is observed with favorable improvement in master's students as compared to deterioration in both class XII and undergraduate students. A comparison of these results with those reported in similar studies conducted in four other countries (U.S., Turkey, Philippines, and Thailand) indicates that there is a difference between the U.S. students and those of the other three countries and also between U.S. experts and Indian teachers. In all countries (U.S., India, Turkey, Thailand, and Philippines) the basic trend of expectation from pre to post test remained the same-there was a deterioration observed in all levels of students. Indian MS students were an exception. A significant difference was observed in the expectations of U.S. experts and Indian teachers. The score of favorable views of Indian class XII and undergraduate students was observed to be less than U.S. students in many clusters. No significant difference was found between Indian male and female students' expectations at any level of study. This study shows that most Indian students have nowhere near an expert's expectations even after instruction, which might affect their motivation and success in physics courses and may have long-term implications on the quality of physics education in schools, colleges. and universities and the scientific research aspirations of the country.

Initial study of neutral post-instruction responses on the Maryland Physics Expectation Survey

“…Searching the literature, we found that in work stating both favorable and unfavorable responses in their postinstruction MPEX scores, the pattern repeated to within 3% to 5% for all introductory physics courses regardless of instructional type. We found similar results for CLASS data with both favorable and unfavorable responses reported [4,7,[13][14][15]. Figure 2 shows a favorable versus unfavorable Redish plot using the sources that we found with lines indicating the 15% and 25% unfavorable bounds.…”

“…There is a body of literature dedicated to the study of student beliefs about their role in the physics classroom and how such beliefs affect student engagement and achievement in the physics course [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. These are instrumental in our understanding of how student expectations of learning may change during the course of an introductory physics course, concentrating on student favorable responses.…”

“…These measurements may be across multiple institutions, multiple instructors, multiple instructional pedagogies, multiple years, or multiple studies synthesized into a single source [1,3,4,7,[11][12][13][14][15]. Successes are measured on an increase in favorable responses-compared to expertsand classrooms are retooled if the favorable responses decrease.…”

Verification of causal influences of reasoning skills and epistemology on physics conceptual learning

“…Both the pre and post results correlated with student gains on physics concept tests, signifying a possible causal connection between epistemology and conceptual learning in physics. Similar findings have been frequently reported across student populations from different nations [14,18].…”

Intertwining evidence- and model-based reasoning in physics sensemaking: An example from electrostatics

“…For example, it is widely agreed that students should, over the course of taking a science class, come to understand science learning as an active process of meaning making rather than a passive process of receiving information [14,15]. Within undergraduate physics courses, scholars are dedicated to pursuing this epistemological goal [15][16][17] and have developed a variety of instruments to examine the success of instructional interventions in achieving it [18][19][20][21].…”