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Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research
written by Ping Zhang and Lin Ding
This paper reports a cross-grade comparative study of Chinese precollege students' epistemological beliefs about physics by using the Colorado Learning Attitudes Survey about Sciences (CLASS). Our students of interest are middle and high schoolers taking traditional lecture-based physics as a mandatory science course each year from the 8th grade to the 12th grade in China. The original CLASS was translated into Mandarin through a rigorous transadaption process, and then it was administered as a pencil-and-paper in-class survey to a total of 1318 students across all the five grade levels (8–12). Our results showed that although in general student epistemological beliefs became less expert-like after receiving more years of traditional instruction (a trend consistent with what was reported in the previous literature), the cross-grade change was not a monotonous decrease. Instead, students at grades 9 and 12 showed a slight positive shift in their beliefs measured by CLASS. Particularly, when compared to the 8th graders, students at the 9th grade demonstrated a significant increase in their views about the conceptual nature of physics and problem-solving sophistication. We hypothesize that both pedagogical and non-pedagogical factors may have contributed to these positive changes. Our results cast light on the complex nature of the relationship between formal instruction and student epistemological beliefs.
Subjects Levels Resource Types
Education Foundations
- Assessment
= Formative Assessment
- Student Characteristics
= Affect
- High School
- Middle School
- Reference Material
= Research study
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Access Rights:
Free access
License:
This material is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
Rights Holder:
American Physical Society
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.9.010110
PACSs:
01.40.Fk
01.40.ek
01.40.G-
Record Creator:
Metadata instance created July 3, 2013 by Raina Khatri
Record Updated:
July 27, 2016 by Lyle Barbato
Last Update
when Cataloged:
April 1, 2013
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