Abstract
This study seeks to test the causal influences of reasoning skills and epistemologies on student conceptual learning in physics. A causal model, integrating multiple variables that were investigated separately in the prior literature, is proposed and tested through path analysis. These variables include student preinstructional reasoning skills measured by the Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning, pre- and postepistemological views measured by the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey, and pre- and postperformance on Newtonian concepts measured by the Force Concept Inventory. Students from a traditionally taught calculus-based introductory mechanics course at a research university participated in the study. Results largely support the postulated causal model and reveal strong influences of reasoning skills and preinstructional epistemology on student conceptual learning gains. Interestingly enough, postinstructional epistemology does not appear to have a significant influence on student learning gains. Moreover, pre- and postinstructional epistemology, although barely different from each other on average, have little causal connection between them.Received 22 March 2014DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.10.023101This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical Society
Highlights
One of the fundamental tasks in education research is to understand what influences student learning [1]
Based on the data collected from the 167 participants, we recorded for each student a set of five scores, representing, respectively, their performance on Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (CTSR), Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), and Force Concept Inventory (FCI)
Student reasoning skills measured by the CTSR were roughly at the so-called transitional stage, which is typical of many college freshmen in previous studies [19]
Summary
One of the fundamental tasks in education research is to understand what influences student learning [1] This task is important because it can directly shape the ways we approach teaching and learning. A host of literature suggests that students’ reasoning skills and epistemological views about knowledge and learning may be important predictors of their conceptual gains in physics [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Empirical studies on this matter largely rely on either correlation analysis or small-scale case studies to hint at possible causal relationships between these variables. While these research approaches are undoubtedly useful for initial exploration, further investigations are needed to directly verify (or falsify) the previously hypothesized causality in an integrative manner
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