Abstract
Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Physics problem solvers may generate diagrams to orient to a scenario, to organize information, to directly obtain an answer, or as a tool of communication. In this study, we asked 19 undergraduate and graduate physics majors to answer 18 multiple-choice (MC) physics questions and then complete six diagramming tasks of situations similar to six of the MC problems: the MC problems contained no prompting regarding diagrams, while the diagramming tasks explicitly asked participants to carefully generate diagrams. This prompting placed participants in one of two epistemic frames, problem solving or communicating, which allowed us to explore which elements and features the students include (or not) in diagrams generated when students are working within these two frames. By comparing students’ spontaneously generated diagrams to their prompted diagrams, we found differences in size, accuracy, and amount of detail in unprompted problem-solving diagrams and prompted communicating diagrams. We also looked at correlations between the presence and features of unprompted diagrams with participants’ answer choice. Looking at the different cohorts (e.g., lower-division undergraduate and graduate students), we found that the differences in diagramming between cohorts were generally smaller than the differences within a cohort. We also explore implications for teaching and research.4 MoreReceived 16 June 2021Accepted 20 December 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.010104Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International 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 SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasResearch methodologyScientific reasoning & problem solvingPhysics Education Research
Highlights
AND BACKGROUNDDiagrammatic representations of physical scenarios are ubiquitous in physics
IV), we look at the timing aspect of unprompted studentgenerated diagrams and other patterns that emerged in our analyses
We would like to remind the reader that all of the students who participated in our study were physics majors who had completed at least a full year of physics, and it is likely that some of our findings may not generalize to physics majors in introductory courses or nonphysics majors in physics courses
Summary
AND BACKGROUNDDiagrammatic representations of physical scenarios are ubiquitous in physics. Graphs and figures are used to communicate scientific information, such as in journal articles and textbooks, and graphs, sketches, and more specialized diagrams (e.g., free body diagrams, ray diagrams, etc.) can aid in physics problem solving. Given the variety and importance of diagrams and their uses in physics, it is not surprising that instruction around constructing diagrams is standard in physics education [1,2,3,4]. Students are shown and expected to perform both general (e.g., graphs and sketches) and specific (e.g., free body diagrams, ray diagrams) techniques that may aid in solving physics problems. Most prevalent is research investigating how students interpret and use canonical and professional representations: such work has been done in the contexts of mechanics [5,6,7,8,9], electricity and magnetism [10,11], quantum mechanics [10,12], thermodynamics
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