The relationship between students’ views and performance of solving physics problems

Abstract

Science education researchers argue that students’ attitudes and beliefs toward science affect students’ learning. In physics education research, questionnaires have been developed to measure students’ views about physics learning and to investigate the relationship between views and conceptual understanding. This paper examines the relation between students’ views about problem solving and students’ performance in solving force problems. First year students who are being prepared to be physics teachers were involved in this study. For data collection, students were asked to fill out the Physics Problem Solving Questionnaire (PPSQ) and to solve two open questions of force topic at the end of the instruction. The PPSQ has 30 items which covers what students think about the role of math, representation, strategy during solving problems. The context of force problem addresses an object is placed on inclined plane and horizontal surface. The results indicate that students’ attitude and performance have a positive correlation (r = 0.6; p < 0.01). Furthermore, students who have positive views about representations in the survey have high performance of drawing free body diagram as one of physics representations (the correlation is significant). Meanwhile, students’ perception about math has not statistically significant with mathematical performance solving force problems.