xD: Probing students' process skills and higher-level thinking
Sessions: PD (8:45 - 10) and QD (10:30-11:45)
Organizer: Xueli Zou, California State University, Chico
Presenters:
Eugenia Etkina, Graduate School of Education, New Jersey State University, Rutgers
Eric Brewe, Department of Physics, Hawaii Pacific University
Laura Lising, Department of Physics, University of Maryland
Xueli Zou, Department of Physics, California State University, Chico
Several NSF-supported projects in physics education have established their goals to help students not only develop a solid conceptual foundation but also gain process skills and higher-level thinking abilities. For instance, one of the goals of the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) is to help introductory physics students develop scientific investigation abilities. Investigating, developing, and evaluating the state of student meta-learning attitudes and skills is a goal of the Learning How To Learn Science project. The Remodeling University Physics aims to help introductory physics students acquire the modeling approach to problem solving.
A foundational challenge here is how to assess students' process skills and higher-level thinking, including questions as follows: How do we know that students possess the desired abilities and skills? What indicators do we have? What data can be used as evidence? How do we collect these data, analyze, and interpret them? This poster session will present some of ongoing studies related to these questions. The session will focus on the data collection and analytical approaches used to study the development of students' process skills and thinking abilities.
Individual abstracts:
"What did you learn this week and why do you believe in it?"*
Eugenia Etkina
Using Weekly Reports(1) we investigated how students answered these questions in an Extended Analytical Physics course--an introductory course for freshmen engineering students at-risk that is taught via the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE)(2). These students have low SAT scores, low mathematics placement course, and are considered to be at risk of failure(3). We collected and coded(4) the Weekly Reports of 130 students during two semesters (28 weeks total). Using the coding scheme we attempted to answer the following questions: How do at-risk students reflect on the construction of physics knowledge? What epistemological preferences do they show in the reports? Is there a correlation between students' conceptual gains, problem solving abilities, and the code indications? How do their reports compare to the reports of honors engineering students studied before? The poster will present the data, data analyses, and preliminary interpretations.
*Supported in part by NSF DUE #0088906
1 Etkina, E. (2000). Weekly Reports: A two-way feedback tool. Science Education 84, 594-605.
2 Etkina, E. & Van Heuvelen, A. (2001). Investigative Science Learning Environment: Using the processes of science and cognitive strategies to learn physics. Proceedings of the 2001 Physics Education Research Conference. Rochester, NY, 17-21.
3 Brahmia, S. & Etkina, E. (2001). Switching students on to science: An innovative course design for physics students. Journal of College Science Teaching, 31 (3), 183-188.
4 May, D. & Etkina, E. (2002). College physics students' epistemological self-reflection and its relationship to conceptual learning. Physics Education Research: A Supplement to the American Journal of Physics, 70 (12), 1249-1258.
Identifying "expertise" as a long-term goal for introductory physics
Eric Brewe
The stated goal for The Energy Thread, an energy centered curriculum designed from the modeling perspective on physics education, was to enhance the development of expertise in novice physics students. Evaluating the successes and failures of this curriculum, hinged on the ability to assess the development of expertise. Evaluating expertise is a broad objective and my attempt at realizing that goal involved various assessments of physics students. In this poster, I will focus on the collection of problem solving data and use of representational tools in focus group interview data. Further, I will provide examples of my efforts at analyzing these data to draw conclusions about the development of expertise in novice students.
The theory that lies behind the "Jan" case study in epistemology and learning*
Laura Lising
In order to probe in detail the interaction of epistemology and learning, Elby and I have made a detailed case study of an introductory physics student, "Jan." We've presented some results at previous AAPT meetings. This poster focuses instead on how our theoretical orientation influenced our method and our analysis. We wanted to provide a fine-grained, causally mechanistic description of how Jan's epistemological views about learning and knowing physics affect her learning. But what counts as "fine-grained?" In our theoretical framework, epistemological views-even about a specific discipline such as physics-can vary with context. Many other researchers assume, by contrast, that epistemological views within a given discipline are more "belief-like." A researcher who ascribes epistemological beliefs to students would agree with us that clinical interviews with Jan provide a useful supplement to our classroom-based observations. But they would probably conduct and analyze those interviews differently from the way we did. Many studies have used interviews as opportunities for direct probes of epistemology through explicit questioning or student self-reflection. These are then analyzed with coding schemes designed to reveal the central consistencies in students' epistemological
behavior, not to explore and account for patterns in the inconsistencies. The point is that it's impossible to discuss what counts as "good" indicators of students' process-oriented skills and knowledge (such as epistemology) without reference-explicit or implicit-to the theoretical assumptions underlying those indicators and methods.Supported by NSF REC # 008 7519
Identifying "naïve" indicators of students' abilities in conducting scientific inquiry experiments*
Xueli Zou
The Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) is a learning system that helps students learn physics using strategies similar to those of practicing physicists. These strategies include observations of physical phenomena, identifying patterns in the data, devising explanations for the patterns and experimental testing of the proposed explanations. A set of experimental activities following the strategies have been developed and implemented in a calculus-based introductory physics course. Deficiencies of process skills and higher-level thinking for students to conduct those experiments have been observed. A study has been carried out to identify the deficiencies as "naïve" indicators of students' abilities in conducting the ISLE-type scientific inquiry experiments. This poster will present some data and discuss data analyses in detail.
*Supported in part by NSF DUE #0088906
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Michael C. Wittmann tel: 207 - 581 - 1237 |
Rachel E. Scherr tel: 301 - 405 - 6179 |