Effect of instructional environment on physics students’ representational skills

dc.creator	Noah D. Finkelstein
dc.creator	Patrick B. Kohl
dc.date	2006-01-01T00:00:00Z
dc.date.accessioned	2015-07-20T22:10:41Z
dc.date.available	2015-07-20T22:10:41Z
dc.identifier	1554-9178
dc.identifier	https://doaj.org/article/e3927c41319e41b3b8b75410ffd875f2
dc.identifier.uri	http://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/123456789/13831
dc.description	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.
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	American Physical Society
dc.relation	http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRSTPER/v2/e010102
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/1554-9178
dc.source	Physical Review Special Topics. Physics Education Research, Vol 2, Iss 1 (2006)
dc.subject	Problem representation
dc.subject	Reformed course
dc.subject	Macrolevel features of a course
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.title	Effect of instructional environment on physics students’ representational skills
dc.type	article