Investigating the quality of mental models deployed by undergraduate engineering students in creating explanations: The case of thermally activated phenomena

Claudio Fazio,Benedetto Di Paola,Onofrio Rosario Battaglia

doi:10.1103/physrevstper.9.020101

Claudio Fazio, Benedetto Di Paola + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevstper.9.020101

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Abstract

This paper describes a method aimed at pointing out the quality of the mental models undergraduate engineering students deploy when asked to create explanations for phenomena or processes and/or use a given model in the same context. Student responses to a specially designed written questionnaire are quantitatively analyzed using researcher-generated categories of reasoning, based on the physics education research literature on student understanding of the relevant physics content. The use of statistical implicative analysis tools allows us to successfully identify clusters of students with respect to the similarity to the reasoning categories, defined as ``practical or everyday,'' ``descriptive,'' or ``explicative.'' Through the use of similarity and implication indexes our method also enables us to study the consistency in students' deployment of mental models. A qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with students after they had completed the questionnaire is used to clarify some aspects which emerged from the quantitative analysis and validate the results obtained. Some implications of this joint use of quantitative and qualitative analysis for the design of a learning environment focused on the understanding of some aspects of the world at the level of causation and mechanisms of functioning are discussed.

Highlights

Many research reports present a new vision of science education which integrates the learning of disciplinary contents and scientific processes [1,2], i.e., the knowledge of scientific explanations and the practices needed to engage in scientific inquiry and design
Valentina: . . . well, we know that the temperature is a . . . level of energy . . . it is a physical quantity that tells us when the system is capable of exchanging more energy . . . like when we have two thermal sources at different temperatures and from the hotter one we can drain more energy . . . . We studied this in thermodynamics
We describe a multimethod approach to the analysis of mental models deployed by students when creating explanations for phenomena or processes

Summary

Introduction

Many research reports present a new vision of science education which integrates the learning of disciplinary contents and scientific processes [1,2], i.e., the knowledge of scientific explanations and the practices needed to engage in scientific inquiry and design. In the last few years, researchers and educators have been increasingly interested in the role of models in science teaching, from various points of view [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. It has been shown [14] that building and using models can help students to consolidate and improve their reasoning skills, helping them to analyze and assess a given phenomenon.

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