Abstract
When considering performing an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences course transformation for one's own institution, life science majors' achievement goals are a necessary consideration to ensure the pedagogical transformation will be effective. However, achievement goals are rarely an explicit consideration in physics education research topics such as metacognition. We investigate a sample population of 218 students in a first-semester introductory algebra-based physics course, drawn from 14 laboratory sections within six semesters of course sections, to determine the influence of achievement goals on life science majors' attitudes towards physics. Learning orientations that, respectively, pertain to mastery goals and performance goals, in addition to a learning orientation that does not report a performance goal, were recorded from students in the specific context of learning a problem-solving framework during an in-class exercise. Students' learning orientations, defined within the context of students' self-reported statements in the specific context of a problem-solving-related research-based course implementation, are compared to pre-post results on physics problem-solving items in a well-established attitudinal survey instrument, in order to establish the categories' validity. In addition, mastery-related and performance-related orientations appear to extend to overall pre-post attitudinal shifts, but not to force and motion concepts or to overall course grade, within the scope of an introductory physics course. There also appears to be differentiation regarding overall course performance within health science majors, but not within biology majors, in terms of learning orientations; however, health science majors generally appear to fare less well on all measurements in the study than do biology majors, regardless of learning orientations.
Highlights
Mastery and performance goals may affect other aspects of student learning outside the classroom; e.g., students who are motivated by mastery of the material have been found to be more likely to successfully transfer knowledge [5]
In Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) literature, a frequent aim is to focus on introductory physics topics that can have a direct application to pertinent life science topics for a specific course track for the life sciences
Analysis of pre-post attitudinal shifts on CLASS problem-solving items appears to show a robust correlation with empirically determined learning orientation categories
Summary
An overarching consideration for IPLS course designers is the need to transfer physics content knowledge in terms of pedagogical needs of life science majors [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]. This issue has long been understood in application to introductory physics courses with predominantly life science majors [29,30,31].
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