- Open Access
Effect of instructional environment on physics students’ representational skills
Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 2, 010102 – Published 20 January, 2006
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.2.010102
Abstract
In a recent study we showed that physics students’ problem-solving performance can depend strongly on problem representation, and that giving students a choice of problem representation can have a significant impact on their performance [P. B. Kohl and N. D. Finklestein, Phys. Rev. ST. Phys. Educ. Res. 1, 010104 (2005)] In this paper, we continue that study in an attempt to separate the effect of instructional technique from the effect of content area. We determine that students in a reform-style introductory physics course are learning a broader set of representational skills than those in a more traditional course. We also analyze the representations used in each course studied and find that the reformed course makes use of a richer set of representations than the traditional course and also makes more frequent use of multiple representations. We infer that this difference in instruction is the source of the broader student skills. These results provide insight into how macrolevel features of a course can influence student skills, complementary to the microlevel picture provided by the first study.
Article Text
References (21)
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Note that the students in the reformed 202 section were largely those from the reformed 201 section. The students in the traditional 202 course had, for the most part, taken a traditional 201 course as well. Thus, when we compare the two 202 sections, we should be aware that any significant differences may be the cumulative result of two semesters of instruction, not one.
One potential weakness in our data stems from the fact that if student absolute performance is too low, relative performances will necessarily be very even regardless of student representational skill. However, only one of the four reform course quizzes [two in 202 presented here and two in 201 (Ref. [11])] shows very low absolute numbers, and these are not present if one considers the likely student misinterpretation described above. Thus, we are confident that the lack of choice/control splits in the reform courses is a genuine effect.
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We chose one-minute intervals as that seemed a reasonable order of magnitude for discrete portions of a discussion or explanation. Intervals on the order of several seconds result in all intervals containing single representations. Intervals of several minutes tend to include all or nearly all possible representations. As a check, we repeated the analysis with two-minute intervals. The figures for multiple representational use were modestly increased, the other categories increased less, and the relative class-to-class variations (which are of the most interest here) were essentially unchanged.
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