Abstract
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey by expanding the Attitudes towards Problem Solving survey of Marx and Cummings and administered it to physics graduate students. Comparison of their responses to the survey questions about problem solving in their own graduate level courses vs. problem solving in the introductory physics courses provides insight into their expertise in introductory and graduate level physics. The physics graduate students' responses to the survey questions were also compared with those of introductory physics and astronomy students and physics faculty. We find that, even for problem solving in introductory physics, graduate students' responses to some survey questions are less expert-like than those of the physics faculty. Comparison of survey responses of graduate students and introductory students for problem solving in introductory physics suggests that graduate students' responses are in general more expert-like than those of introductory students. However, survey responses suggest that graduate-level problem solving by graduate students on several measures has remarkably similar trends to introductory-level problem solving by introductory students.
Highlights
Students’ attitudes and approaches toward learning can have a significant impact on what students learn1–6͔
Even for problem solving in introductory physics, graduate students’ responses to some survey questions are less expertlike than those of the physics faculty
Survey responses suggest that graduate-level problem solving by graduate students on several measures has remarkably similar trends to introductory-level problem solving by introductory students
Summary
Students’ attitudes and approaches toward learning can have a significant impact on what students learn1–6͔. Schoenfeld’s strategy helped most students adopt an effective problem solving approach within a few weeks and they started to devote time to qualitative analysis and decision making before looking for equations11͔. Schoenfeld realized that one reason students had such an attitude was because they saw their instructor solving problems during the lectures without faltering or spending too much time thinking To bust this myth about problem solving, Schoenfeld began each of his geometry classes with the first 10 min devoted to taking students’ questions about challenging geometry problemsoften from the end of the chapter exercisesand attempting to solve them without prior preparation. We find that the attitudes and approaches of graduate students differ significantly from introductory students and physics faculty on several measures
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