Changes in
Students’ Epistemologies
During Introductory Physics Instruction
by Timothy
D. Brown
Advisors:
Eleanor C. Sayre, Paul W. Irving
Kansas State University Physics
Department REU Program
This program is funded by the National Science Foundation through grant number PHY-1157044. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Welcome to my webpage. This page summarizes my experience participating
in the Physics Education Research (PER) group at KSU’s physics REU during Summer 2012. My research project, which was advised by and
built off of much of the previous work done by Ellie Sayre, focused on how the
extent to which students identify as physicists informs their views on
knowledge, and on how the sophistication of these knowledge views change during
basic-level physics instruction. Ellie’s post-doc Paul Irving was also
instrumental in giving me feedback on my project.
Below, I briefly describe the project in the Overview, with a much more detailed summary in the Research Description, and also post my REU Presentations and the Poster summarizing my findings, which I presented at
the PERC 2012 conference. Scroll all the way down to learn
more About Me. Finally, I've included some Useful Links. Here’s a page of my posting.
See my new bookmark.
Project Overview: Previous PER studies have found a correlation
between the sophistication of students’ knowledge beliefs and their mastery of
physics topics: those with more “expert” beliefs tend to retain a higher
mastery of the physics content, able to transfer this understanding to many
different contexts. This research led to several studies on how physics instruction
affects the development of students’ knowledge beliefs. These studies, using a
pre/post testing method with agree-disagree surveys, suggest that the knowledge
beliefs become more novice after physics instruction.
Our method, the Response
Curves Method, tests the robustness of this result by performing weekly data
collections, allowing us to examine trends over time throughout the semester.
Graphical analysis, and classical statistical
regression can tell us whether students’ beliefs are really becoming less
sophisticated during physics instruction, and how the beliefs are coordinated
with certain demographics groups.
Research
Description:
Click here to download a detailed summary of my research in pdf format.
REU Presentation: Click
below to download my biweekly REU powerpoint
presentations.
Poster: Click here to
download the poster I presented at PERC 2012
About Me: At
the time of this writing I am a rising junior studying Electronics within the
Engineering Physics major at the University of Tulsa. Besides physics, I have a
strong interest in music and remain involved as a flautist in my school’s band,
and in engineering, which expresses itself as my involvement in Engineers
without Borders. I also love the interconnections between mathematics and
physics, and my mother’s job teaching and my dad’s constant inquiry into the
physics I do has been a major factor in my interest in teaching, hence my
choice of a PER project this summer. When I’m not doing physics, I’m reading or
watching movies or doing improvisational comedy with my school’s troupe.
These sites should help to orient the reader
within the larger physics/ PER community:
American
Physical Society Statements on Ethics
My Research group's home page
Previous
Versions:
None
Created
3 August 2012