Abstract
The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is a new instrument designed to measure student beliefs about physics and about learning physics. This instrument extends previous work by probing additional aspects of student beliefs and by using wording suitable for students in a wide variety of physics courses. The CLASS has been validated using interviews, reliability studies, and extensive statistical analyses of responses from over 5000 students. In addition, a new methodology for determining useful and statistically robust categories of student beliefs has been developed. This paper serves as the foundation for an extensive study of how student beliefs impact and are impacted by their educational experiences. For example, this survey measures the following: that most teaching practices cause substantial drops in student scores; that a student's likelihood of becoming a physics major correlates with their ``Personal Interest'' score; and that, for a majority of student populations, women's scores in some categories, including ``Personal Interest'' and ``Real World Connections,'' are significantly different from men's scores.
Highlights
Over the last decade, researchers in science education have identified a variety of student attitudes and beliefs that shape and are shaped by student classroom experience.[1,2,3,4] Work by House[5,6] and Sadler and Tai[7] indicate that students’ expectations are better predictors of college science performance than the amount of high-school science or math they completed
We have developed and validated an instrument, the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science SurveyCLASS,[8–12] which builds on work done by existing surveys
We believe that a longer survey will encounter significant difficulties with widespread faculty and student acceptance. ͑6͒ The administration and scoring were designed to be easy, allowing for an online survey and for automated scoring. ͑7͒ The grouping of statements into categories of student beliefs was subject to rigorous statistical analysis and only statistically robust categories were accepted
Summary
Researchers in science education have identified a variety of student attitudes and beliefs that shape and are shaped by student classroom experience.[1,2,3,4] Work by House[5,6] and Sadler and Tai[7] indicate that students’ expectations are better predictors of college science performance than the amount of high-school science or math they completed. Our empirically determined categories and interviews demonstrate that students do have many consistent ideas about learning physics and problem solving; we have found certain ideas, such as the nature of science, where our interviews and survey results suggest that students do not have coherent ideas, at least none that we are able to measure. Rennie and Parker[15] provide a powerful example, which supports the value of empirically determined categories They present an attitude survey designed to focus on the single idea of interest in science. The researchers believed, based on theory, that the questions could be broken into four types; learning about science, doing experiments, “work with...,” and “create or grow....” When analyzed using this categorization scheme, very little difference was seen between boys and girls. We present a few brief examples of the results we are finding from widespread use of this survey
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