Students’ “epistemological” beliefs—their views about the nature of knowledge and learning—affect how they approach physics courses. For instance, a student who believes physics knowledge to consist primarily of disconnected facts and formulas will study differently from a student who views physics as an interconnected web of concepts. Unfortunately, previous studies show that physics courses, even ones that help students learn concepts particularly well, generally do not lead to significant changes in students’ epistemological beliefs. This paper discusses instructional practices and curricular elements, suitable for both college and high school, that helped students develop substantially more sophisticated beliefs about knowledge and learning, as measured by the Maryland Physics Expectations Survey and by the Epistemological Beliefs Assessment for Physical Science.
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Researchers disagree about where to draw the boundaries around epistemology and metacognition. My arguments don’t rely on a precise choice of boundary between the two concepts.
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At a bigger high school, many of my students might have opted for an “honors” physics class or a “conceptual” (low-math) physics class.
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To get a sense of the correspondence, we can calculate the correlation coefficient between students’ scores on an EBAPS subscale and their scores on the corresponding MPEX cluster. The correlation between EBAPS Structure of Knowledge and the sum of MPEX Concepts and Coherence is 0.65. The correlation between EBAPS Nature of Learning and MPEX Independence is 0.42. Those correlations are both statistically significant to By contrast, the correlation between EBAPS Real-life applicability and MPEX Reality link is only 0.23, which is of marginal statistical significance The low correlation reflects a substantive difference between the two subscales. MPEX Reality link focuses partly on students’ views about whether they will use physics concepts outside the classroom, whereas EBAPS focuses more on students views about whether, in principle, classroom physics concepts describe phenomena in the real world.
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After we finished Newtonian mechanics, my students achieved an average score of 84% on the Force Concept Inventory, comparable to the post-test scores of Harvard students; see Hake (Ref. 12). I did not give my students the FCI as a pre-test. An independent sample of 250 other 11th grade physics students at the same school took the FCI as a pre-test, achieving an average score of 32%. My California students did not take the FCI but generally performed well on FCI-like questions included on tests, including those presented in Sec. IV D.
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Many textbooks come with an instructor’s solution manual or a study guide with worked problems. Other sources of problems with detailed solutions include Andrew Elby, The Portable T.A.: A Physics Problem Solving Guide. Volume 2, 2nd ed. (Prentice–Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998);
Research and Education Association and M. Fogiel, The Physics Problem Solver (REA, New York, 1976).
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© 2001 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2001
American Association of Physics Teachers
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