Stimulated recall interviews for describing pragmatic epistemology

Christopher W Shubert,Dawn C Meredith

doi:10.1103/physrevstper.11.020138

Christopher W Shubert, Dawn C Meredith

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevstper.11.020138

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Abstract

Stimulated recall interviews for describing pragmatic epistemology

Highlights

As instructors, we have seen students who have worked in ways we would not endorse: using equations without understanding what they meant, completing problems without considering whether or not the answer makes sense, or reading and re-reading the text with little comprehension
In this study we want to focus on something different: students’ first-hand accounts of their ideas about learning and knowledge as they engage in learning activities. This might seem impossible in practice; how can students engage in authentic learning and reflect deeply on that learning simultaneously without changing what we hope to measure? In this paper, we argue that we can move closer to accessing this rich, privileged data using a new methodology based on stimulated recall interviews (SRI) [8,9]
The “Selection Reason Matches” metric in step four is calculated as the ratio of the number of clips for which the reason selected matched to the number of clips for which the selected natural classroom videos (NCV) time overlapped

Summary

Introduction

We have seen students who have worked in ways we would not endorse: using equations without understanding what they meant, completing problems without considering whether or not the answer makes sense, or reading and re-reading the text with little comprehension. We suspect that these students’ ideas about knowledge and knowing (i.e., their epistemologies) will not allow them to be successful because they are not engaged in the difficult cognitive work required for deep learning. As part of the assessment of these reforms, we wanted to learn what epistemological ideas students used during the lab activities, if these ideas were productive, and if they matured and deepened over the two semesters of the course

Methods

Results

Conclusion