Understanding and Promoting Effective Use of Representations in Physics Learning

Abstract

We present a series of empirical studies on undergraduate students’ use of representation in introductory physics in order to describe when and how students use representations, and to understand the impacts of varied instructional strategies on student performance with representations. We demonstrate that student performance on isomorphic problems can vary, often dramatically, simply by changing the representational formats of the questions posed. Furthermore, we demonstrate that students do not have fixed forms of expertise; in some cases, students will perform better using one representational format and in other cases will perform more poorly using the same representational format. We also find that when students are given a choice of representational format on physics problems, their performance on these problems does not necessarily improve. On the macro-scale, we find that the educational environments in which students are taught can have dramatic impact. Those environments that regularly use multiple representations and those that hold students responsible for using multiple representations positively impact students’ performance and ability to work across representations.