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  • Open Access

Investigating unprompted and prompted diagrams generated by physics majors during problem solving

Michael Vignal and Bethany R. Wilcox

  • Department of Physics, University of Colorado, 390 UCB, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA

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Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 18, 010104 – Published 12 January, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.010104

Abstract

Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Physics problem solvers may generate diagrams to orient to a scenario, to organize information, to directly obtain an answer, or as a tool of communication. In this study, we asked 19 undergraduate and graduate physics majors to answer 18 multiple-choice (MC) physics questions and then complete six diagramming tasks of situations similar to six of the MC problems: the MC problems contained no prompting regarding diagrams, while the diagramming tasks explicitly asked participants to carefully generate diagrams. This prompting placed participants in one of two epistemic frames, problem solving or communicating, which allowed us to explore which elements and features the students include (or not) in diagrams generated when students are working within these two frames. By comparing students’ spontaneously generated diagrams to their prompted diagrams, we found differences in size, accuracy, and amount of detail in unprompted problem-solving diagrams and prompted communicating diagrams. We also looked at correlations between the presence and features of unprompted diagrams with participants’ answer choice. Looking at the different cohorts (e.g., lower-division undergraduate and graduate students), we found that the differences in diagramming between cohorts were generally smaller than the differences within a cohort. We also explore implications for teaching and research.

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Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 18, 010104– Published 12 January, 2022
  • Received 16 June 2021
  • Accepted 20 December 2021
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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