Investigating students’ mental models about the quantization of light, energy, and angular momentum

Nilüfer Didiş,Ali Eryılmaz,Şakir Erkoç

doi:10.1103/physrevstper.10.020127

Abstract

This paper is the first part of a multiphase study examining students’ mental models about the quantization of physical observables—light, energy, and angular momentum. Thirty-one second-year physics and physics education college students who were taking a modern physics course participated in the study. The qualitative analysis of data revealed six variations in students’ mental models about the quantization of physical observables: scientific model, primitive scientific model, shredding model, alternating model, integrative model, and evolution model. These models were determined to be context dependent. In addition, some students are in a mixed-model state where they use multiple mental models in explaining a phenomenon and use these models inconsistently.3 MoreReceived 8 January 2014DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.10.020127This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical Society

Highlights

IntroductionOne of the theories about knowledge organization is “mental modeling.”
We considered the issues mentioned in Miles and Huberman ([63], pp. 60–63) and the following steps were taken: (1) the codes were named by considering their closeness to the concepts, (2) detailed definitions of the codes were made, and (3) double coding was done by a different researcher
We named each mental model identified in this study due to the characteristics of its conceptual framework

Summary

Introduction

One of the theories about knowledge organization is “mental modeling.”. A mental model, briefly, is “an internal representation which acts out as a structural analogue of situations or processes. Craik [2] is accepted as the pioneer of the theory of mental models. 50) and provided smallscale models to explain processes After forty years, the mental model term was used in two different books with the same name, Johnson-Laird’s [3] and Gentner and Stevens’s [4] “Mental Models.”. While Johnson-Laird’s (1983) book explained the theory from the perspective of psychology, Gentner and Stevens’s [4] book clarified it from the perspective of “science education” by editing different researchers’ studies and identifying students’ mental models of science concepts

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