written by Nicole R. Hallinen, Min Chi, Doris B. Chin, Joe Prempeh, Kristen P. Blair, and Daniel L. Schwartz

Cognitive developmental psychology often describes children's growing qualitative understanding of the physical world. Physics educators may be able to use the relevant methods to advantage for characterizing changes in students' qualitative reasoning. Siegler1 developed the "rule assessment" method for characterizing levels of qualitative understanding for two factor situations (e.g., volume and mass for density). The method assigns children to rule levels that correspond to the degree they notice and coordinate the two factors. Here, we provide a brief tutorial plus a demonstration of how we have used this method to evaluate instructional outcomes with middle-school students who learned about torque, projectile motion, and collisions using different instructional methods with simulations.

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Published January 24, 2013
Last Modified June 25, 2013