Abstract
BackgroundWhile there has been increasing recognition of the importance of attending to students’ views about what counts as knowing and learning a STEM field, surveys that measure these “epistemological” beliefs are often used in ways that implicitly assume the fields, e.g., “physics,” to be a single domain about which students might have sophisticated or naïve beliefs. We demonstrate this is not necessarily the case and argue for attending to possible differences in students’ epistemological beliefs across different sub-domains of physics. In modern physics and quantum mechanics courses for engineering and physics students, we administered a set of modified Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) items. Each selected item was turned into two items, with the word “physics” changed to “classical physics” in one and “quantum physics” in the other.ResultsWe found significant splits between students’ survey responses about classical vs. quantum physics on some items, both pre- and post-instruction. In classical physics, as compared to quantum physics, students were more likely to report the salience of real-world connections and the possibility of combining mathematical and conceptual reasoning during problem solving.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that attending to sub-domain specificity of students’ beliefs about physics can be fruitful and ought to influence our instructional choices.
Highlights
Over the last decade or more, the physics education community has grown to acknowledge the importance of attending to students’ views about what counts as knowing and learning physics (Elby, 2011; Madsen, McKagan, & Sayre, 2015)—in the same way that students’ views about knowing and learning are significant in other domains (Edmondson & Novak, 1993; Rodríguez & Cano, 2006)
Qualitative methods for research question 2: do students spontaneously express splits? Data collection This section addresses the second research question: Do Modern Physics students in interviews spontaneously express epistemological views related to differences between classical and quantum physics? As one of the multiple qualitative data streams collected for the larger project, we individually interviewed seven students recruited from the Colorado Boulder (CU) Modern Physics course in semester 1, both mid-semester and near the end of the semester
Further analysis of the data set in this paper will look at pre-post shifts on the bifurcated survey items, addressing the question: Are the pre/post shifts in students’ epistemological beliefs before and after a Modern Physics course different for quantum and classical physics?. This preliminary study demonstrates that a significant number of students taking modern physics and quantum mechanics report different epistemological beliefs about classical physics and quantum physics, both before and after instruction in quantum physics
Summary
Over the last decade or more, the physics education community has grown to acknowledge the importance of attending to students’ views about what counts as knowing and learning physics (Elby, 2011; Madsen, McKagan, & Sayre, 2015)—in the same way that students’ views about knowing and learning are significant in other domains (Edmondson & Novak, 1993; Rodríguez & Cano, 2006). Our study is exploratory in nature and demonstrates the existence of this phenomenon rather than pinpointing the breadth or mechanisms of the outcomes These split CLASS results challenge various assumptions that we, as discipline-based education researchers and instructors, might make when attending to students’ views about knowing and learning physics. While there has been increasing recognition of the importance of attending to students’ views about what counts as knowing and learning a STEM field, surveys that measure these “epistemological” beliefs are often used in ways that implicitly assume the fields, e.g., “physics,” to be a single domain about which students might have sophisticated or naïve beliefs We demonstrate this is not necessarily the case and argue for attending to possible differences in students’ epistemological beliefs across different sub-domains of physics. Each selected item was turned into two items, with the word “physics” changed to “classical physics” in one and “quantum physics” in the other
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