Abstract
In a recent study we showed that physics students' problem-solving performance can depend strongly on problem representation, and that giving students a choice of problem representation can have a significant impact on their performance [P. B. Kohl and N. D. Finklestein, Phys. Rev. ST. Phys. Educ. Res. 1, 010104 (2005)] In this paper, we continue that study in an attempt to separate the effect of instructional technique from the effect of content area. We determine that students in a reform-style introductory physics course are learning a broader set of representational skills than those in a more traditional course. We also analyze the representations used in each course studied and find that the reformed course makes use of a richer set of representations than the traditional course and also makes more frequent use of multiple representations. We infer that this difference in instruction is the source of the broader student skills. These results provide insight into how macrolevel features of a course can influence student skills, complementary to the microlevel picture provided by the first study.
Highlights
Our previous work1 showed that physics students’ problem-solving success depends on the representation of the problem, corroborating other work in physics education researchPER.2 That is, whether one represents a physics problem in terms of words, equations, graphs, or pictures can have a significant impact on student performance on that problem
In a recent study we showed that physics students’ problem-solving performance can depend strongly on problem representation, and that giving students a choice of problem representation can have a significant impact on their performanceP
We analyze the representations used in each course studied and find that the reformed course makes use of a richer set of representations than the traditional course and makes more frequent use of multiple representations
Summary
Our previous work showed that physics students’ problem-solving success depends on the representation of the problem, corroborating other work in physics education researchPER. That is, whether one represents a physics problem in terms of words, equations, graphs, or pictures can have a significant impact on student performance on that problem. The results from our study were complicated: Student problem-solving performance often depended very strongly on whether or not they had a choice of problem format, but the strength and direction of the effect varied with the representation, the subject matter, and the instructor. Interesting is the fact that the 202 course showed much stronger choice/control splits than the 201 course This led to macrolevel questions: Was this qualitative difference in performance data a result of the different instructional style, the different content area, or some combination? We predicted that given the same quizzes, the choice/control splits would be much weaker than they were in the original study with the traditional professor.17 This prediction held true, leading to the second part of the paper, in which we analyze the specific differences in representation use in these classes in lectures, exams, and homeworks. The results allow us to conclude that a pervasive use of multiple representations in a physics course can support students learning a broader set of representational skills than students in a representationally sparse environment
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