Strongly and weakly directed approaches to teaching multiple representation use in physics

Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2007, Pages

  Kohl, Patrick B ^a   Rosengrant, David ^b   Finkelstein, Noah D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

^b RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250613026     PISSN: 15549178     EISSN: 15549178     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.3.010108     Document Type: Article

References (33)

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30. We emphasize that this is an evaluation of the representations contained within the problem, not necessarily an evaluation of all the representations used by the students. Students were intended to (and often did) use FBDs and pictures in many of their solutions of Rutgers exam problems that were strictly mathematical in presentation.
31. We had initially planned to give problem 4 separately, but changed this partway through the study, resulting in some recitation sections not receiving problem 4.
32. We have found that leaving the data unnormalized tends to prompt the conclusion that the Rutgers students substantially outperformed the CU students, neglecting the previously mentioned problem format difference.
33. We will not attempt to argue causation here. It could well be that using multiple representations leads to better performance directly. Alternatively, it could be that better students overall are more likely to use multiple representations. Or, most likely (in our opinions), these are both true, and are intertwined.