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A longitudinal study of the development of attitudes and beliefs towards physics
written by Katherine A. Slaughter, Simon P. Bates, and Ross K. Galloway
Student success in a physics degree has been shown to depend on more than just performance in course assessment: important additional factors include student attitudes and beliefs about their subject. We have used an instrument (CLASS) that measures how student epistemologies evolve over the course of their undergraduate degree. Our previous work has sampled a cross-section of students at all levels across the physics undergraduate programme at Edinburgh in a single academic year, and found that student attitudes and beliefs remain essentially static. Here, we present fully longitudinal data collected over the past three years, where we track the evolution of the attitudes and beliefs of one group of students. We find broadly similar results: attitudes and beliefs remain surprisingly consistent over time. This suggests that a 'cross-sectional' or 'pseudo-longitudinal' study (collecting snapshot data in one year) is a valid methodology, rather than necessarily having to wait several years to accumulate truly longitudinal data.
Physics Education Research Conference 2011
Part of the PER Conference series
Omaha, Nebraska: August 3-4, 2011
Volume 1413, Pages 359-362
Subjects Levels Resource Types
Education Foundations
- Assessment
= Longitudinal
- Research Design & Methodology
= Evaluation
- Student Characteristics
= Affect
- Lower Undergraduate
- Graduate/Professional
- Upper Undergraduate
- Reference Material
= Research study
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Mirror:
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3680069
Access Rights:
Free access and
Available for purchase
A preprint of the work is available. A hard copy of the PERC 2011 proceedings is available for purchase from the AIP.
Restriction:
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
DOI:
10.1063/1.3680069
PACS:
01.40.Fk
Keywords:
Attitude Development, Belief Development, CLASS, Longitudinal Study, PERC 2011
Record Cloner:
Metadata instance created April 26, 2012 by Lyle Barbato
Record Updated:
May 15, 2012 by Vince Kuo
Last Update
when Cataloged:
February 6, 2012
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