ANEXO – III DEFINICIONES

Arnold B. Arons was one of the first physics educators to report the effectiveness of his teaching within a physics class (Arons 1965, 1976, 1997). Along with other physics educators (Karplus 1977) he began to realise that physics instruction was no longer about the reproduction of students in their own self image or in other words physicists producing more physicists (Redish 1994). This realisation came about due to the change in student profile attending their classes. Historically, the students who studied physics were highly motivated and interested in the subject and so would become the next physicists. However, as the landscape of higher education began to change (Woodard et al. 2000) and became more accessible to all, traditional, highly motivated students were replaced in physics classes with students who viewed physics merely as a compulsory element of their course.

Even with these early instigators of physics education research, physics education itself remained relatively unchanged for over fifty years (Knight 2002; Redish 2003). It is only in the past few decades that there has been a veritable explosion in the amount of research in physics education. Evidence of said explosion can be seen in development of a journal dedicated to physics education research in American Physical Society (APS): Physical Review Special Topics (PRST) – Physics Education Research (PER) and the research published within it (Finkelstein & Pollock 2005; Rimoldini & Singh 2005; Kohl & Finkelstein 2005; Bao & Redish 2006; Ding et al. 2006; Scott et al. 2006; Tuminaro & Redish 2007; Yerushalmi et al. 2007; Pollock et al. 2007; Scherr 2008; Kohl & Finkelstein 2008; Thornton et al. 2009; Brookes & Etkina 2009). The above listed papers are evidence of the vast array of ongoing studies in physics education research such as attitude evaluations/epistemological beliefs (Adams et al. 2006; Redish et al. 1998), student conceptions/cognitive processing (Aguirre 1988; Trowbridge & McDermott 1980, 1981),

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expert/novice studies (Stocklmayer & Treagust 1996; Larkin & Reif 1979) and curriculum development (Reif et al. 1976; Heller et al. 1992). Below I provide an overview of the relevant and pertinent research that has informed this research study.

Like many other disciplines, physics has tended to be governed by the use of pedagogical approaches associated with behaviourist learning theory (Skinner 1968) as explained in section 2.2.2. That is, the approaches have been biased towards teacher centred approaches which try to transmit the ‘correct’ information to the students (Redish 2003) or as Arons puts it (Arons 1997 p.1) “teaching of physics is governed by a long-established tradition of 'backwards science', where physics is presented as a collection of end products, formulae, well-formulated definitions, canonical statements about atoms and electrons, quarks, gluons, big bangs, black holes and other 'esoteric vocabularies of modern physics'”. At present, and in the past, the presentation of such knowledge to students has been dominated by passive student lectures, recipe laboratories, and algorithmic-problem examinations with no interest in the cognitive mechanism that may be used by an individual to learn a process, nor is there an interest in whether the process learned made any sense to the individual and hence if they could use that knowledge in a different context.

However, physics education research has developed rapidly over the past forty years and the shortcomings revealed by much of this research have become more apparent with the changes in student profile as mentioned above, due to things such as mass education, diversity, competition and information technology (McDermott 1991). A possible explanation for these shortcomings may be that traditional physics education tends to rely on the assumption that systematically and repetitively solving relatively simple algorithmic problems will develop in students an understanding of the physics concepts and principles, as well as an appreciation of the role they play in solving problems (McDermott 1991; Leonard et al. 1996; Mazur 1992). To see evidence of this, one merely has to turn to one of the many physics text books available and examine how this is presented (Young 1999; Wilson & Buffa 2002).

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Arons (1997 p.1) is particularly critical of this type of teaching and states “We compose detailed instructions for straightforward solution of end-of-chapter problems and for easy arrival at correct results in the laboratory exercises. We do our best to equip our students with correct answers, to save them from the trouble of thinking, and to ensure examination success”. He continues “We are merely 'cultivating blind memorisation without comprehension' and are 'crushing our students into the flatness of equation-grinding automats. We do not even give them a chance to begin to understand what "understanding" means”. A great deal of the research that has been done in the last forty years has gone some way towards demonstrating that problem solving by itself does not develop a deep understanding of concepts and principles. Students participating and learning through this type of activity often become proficient problem solvers, gaining the ability to solve problems by equation recognition alone (Clement,1982; McDermott 1984, 1991; Hestenes et al. 1992; Bowden et al. 1992). In Bowden’s research, in particular, it was found that “The capacity to get the correct numerical solution has a low correlation with the capacity to demonstrate qualitative understanding of the concepts in different circumstances” (Bowden 1992 p. 267). Other studies have shown that students, who could easily solve standard textbook problems, were often unable to relate the results to other, more complex situations (Trowbridge & McDermott 1981; McDermott et al. 1987; Ambrose et al. 1999).

The previously dominant learning theory of behaviourism provides another significant concern in its approach to physics teaching in that its proponents have a propensity to view students as ‘blank slates’. Information is transmitted or given to the students from the teacher and in order for a student to develop a deep conceptual understanding of the material they must repetitively solve problems. However, results from physics education and cognitive research show that students begin a physics course with their own conceptual framework developed either through their own experiences (including formal instruction) or through ‘common sense’ (for example see: Halloun & Hestenes, 1985a, 1985b; Redish et al. 1998; Redish 2003). Students who enter a classroom have generally been constructing knowledge for some years and by the time these students reach third level education they could have constructed twenty years of knowledge from their previous experiences of the world and learning physics. This view of learning at this stage of the thesis may be

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regarded as constructivism which has been previously described in more detail in section 2.2.4. Constructivism has become the dominant paradigm in modern educational theories in the United States.

The shift of dominance from behaviourism to constructivism resulted in the requirement to change from teacher centred approaches to instruction to student-centred approaches to learning (Rogers 1983). The emphasis in a student-centred approach is on the student and specifically what the student is learning (not on what the teacher is covering or transmitting), what the student knows when they begin and how they interact with the learning environment and content (Redish 1994). In a student-centred learning environment the principle role of the lecturer has changed from transmitting information to establishing and supporting learning environments which enable the student to challenge and test their world views.