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In this study, we have explored the effectiveness of two instructional approaches in the context of the motion of objects falling at terminal speed in the presence of air resistance. We ground these instructional approaches in dual-process theories of reasoning, which assert that human cognition relies on two thinking processes. Dual-process theories suggest multiple possible avenues by which instruction might impact student reasoning. In this paper, we compare two possible instructional approaches: one designed to reinforce the normative approach (improving the outputs of the intuitive process) and another that guides students to reflect on and analyze their initial ideas (supporting the analytic process). The results suggest that for students who have already demonstrated a minimum level of requisite knowledge, instruction that supports analysis of their likely intuitive mental model leads to greater learning benefits in the short term than instruction that focuses solely on providing practice with the normative mindware. These results have implications for the design of instructional materials and help to demonstrate how dual-process theories can be leveraged to explain the success of existing research-based materials.

In this paper, we seek to evaluate the extent to which students can follow a deductive reasoning chain when it is presented to them. A great deal of instruction in introductory physics courses is centered on presenting students with a logical argument that starts from first principles and systematically leads to a particular conclusion. This approach to instruction may conflict with current models of how students reason, including dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making. We investigated student ability to follow reasoning chains at several different institutions, across multiple topics that span introductory mechanics and electricity and magnetism. (For the purposes of this study, we operationally define “following” a reasoning chain—either a correct chain or an incorrect chain—as selecting the appropriate conclusion to a given chain.) To accomplish this, we asked students to answer a physics question and provide an explanation for their answer. We then presented them with a reasoning chain generated by a fictitious student and asked them to select the appropriate concluding statement for that chain. Some of these fictitious chains were fully correct, while others contained a conceptual or logical error. We intentionally used tasks for which students would be unlikely to generate correct reasoning chains on their own. We found that for most tasks, students were generally successful at following chains based on common incorrect reasoning. Students who themselves generated the correct reasoning, however, were much more successful at following correct reasoning chains. Connections between this work and dual-process theories, as well as implications for instruction, are discussed.

Because of the focus of introductory physics courses on improving students’ problem-solving and reasoning skills, researchers in physics education have been developing and refining theoretical frameworks for how students reason through physics problems. Recently, researchers have begun to apply dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR), from cognitive science and psychology, to support mechanistic predictions of student reasoning in physics. In this article, we employ a novel methodology involving reasoning chain construction tasks in order to test DPToR-based predictions for two physics questions in which salient distracting features have been found to cue incorrect first-available mental models. In a reasoning chain construction task, students respond to a physics question by drawing from a list of reasoning elements (all of which are true) in order to assemble a chain of reasoning that leads to a conclusion. Two sets of experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that students would be unlikely to abandon an incorrect first-available model unless they were provided with information that called into question the satisfactoriness of that model. We found that providing increased access to information relevant to the correct line of reasoning did not produce large differences in student answering patterns. However, providing increased access to information refuting the first-available model did produce large differences in student answering patterns, but only among those students who demonstrated that they possessed the relevant mindware (i.e., conceptual understanding). Our findings are consistent with DPToR and further illustrate the applicability of such reasoning frameworks in the context of physics.

Over the course of the introductory calculus-based physics course, students are often expected to build conceptual understanding and develop and refine skills in problem solving and qualitative inferential reasoning. Many of the research-based materials developed over the past 30 years by the physics education research community use sequences of scaffolded questions to step students through a qualitative inferential reasoning chain. It is often tacitly assumed that, in addition to building conceptual understanding, such materials improve qualitative reasoning skills. However, clear documentation of the impact of such materials on qualitative reasoning skills is critical. New methodologies are needed to better study reasoning processes and to disentangle, to the extent possible, processes related to physics content from processes general to all human reasoning. As a result, we have employed network analysis methodologies to examine student responses to reasoning-related tasks in order to gain deeper insight into the nature of student reasoning in physics. In this paper, we show that network analysis metrics are both interpretable and valuable when applied to student reasoning data generated from "reasoning chain construction tasks." We also demonstrate that documentation of improvements in the articulation of specific lines of reasoning can be obtained from a network analysis of responses to reasoning chain construction tasks.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Research in physics education has contributed substantively to improvements in the learning and teaching of university physics by informing the development of research-based instructional materials for physics courses. Reports on the design of these materials have tended to focus on overall improvements in student performance, while the role of theory in informing the development, refinement, and assessment of the materials is often not clearly articulated. In this article, we illustrate how dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making have guided the ongoing development, testing, and analysis of an instructional intervention, implemented at three different institutions, designed to build consistency in student reasoning about the application of Newton’s 2nd law to objects at rest. By employing constructs from cognitive science associated with dual-process theories of reasoning (such as mindware and cognitive reflection), we were able not only to examine the overall improvement in student performance but also to investigate the impact of the intervention on two aspects of productive reasoning—mindware and cognitive reflection. Our analysis showed that the intervention strengthened students’ mindware such that students were able to apply it as a criterion while checking the validity of their intuitive responses. Moreover, logistic regression revealed that the success of our intervention was mediated by the students’ cognitive reflection skills. Indeed, for students with comparable mindware, those who demonstrated a weaker tendency toward cognitive reflection were less likely to initiate conflict detection and therefore never had the opportunity to utilize their mindware. We believe that this kind of integrated, theory-driven approach to intervention design and testing represents an important first step in efforts to both account for and leverage domain-general reasoning phenomena in the learning and teaching of physics.

The research reported in this article represents a systematic, multiyear investigation of student understanding of the behavior of bipolar junction transistor circuits using a variety of different tasks to isolate and probe key aspects of transistor circuit behavior. The participants in this study were undergraduates enrolled in upper-division physics electronics courses at three institutions, as well as undergraduates in upper-division engineering electronics courses at one of the institutions. Findings from this research indicate that many students have not developed a robust conceptual understanding of the functionality of bipolar junction transistors circuits even after all relevant instruction. Most notably, when asked to analyze the impact of a transistor circuit on input signals, students frequently applied reasoning appropriate for an analysis of the circuit’s dc bias behavior. However, students often displayed knowledge of fundamental transistor behavior when responding to more targeted questions. This article provides insight into student thinking about transistor circuits, describing the most prevalent conceptual and reasoning difficulties identified and discussing some important implications for instruction.

A growing body of scholarly work indicates that student performance on physics problems stems from many factors, including relevant conceptual understanding. However, in contexts in which significant conceptual difficulties have been documented via research, it can be difficult to pinpoint and isolate such factors because students’ written and interview responses rarely reveal the full richness of their conscious and, perhaps more importantly, subconscious reasoning paths. In this investigation, informed by dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making as well as the theoretical construct of accessibility, we conducted a series of experiments in order to gain greater insight into the factors impacting student performance on the “five-block problem,” which has been used in the literature to probe student thinking about buoyancy. In particular, we examined both the impact of problem design (including salient features and cueing) and the impact of targeted instruction focused on density-based arguments for sinking and floating and on neutral buoyancy. The investigation found that instructional modifications designed to remove the strong intuitive appeal of the first-available response led to significantly improved performance, without improving student conceptual understanding of the requisite buoyancy concepts. As such, our findings represent an important first step in identifying systematic strategies for using theories from cognitive science to guide the development and refinement of research-based instructional materials.

Developing students’ ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of troubleshooting. However, that work has focused primarily on individual students’ metacognitive processes or troubleshooting abilities. In contrast, electronics courses often require students to work in pairs, and hence students’ in-class experiences likely have significant social dimensions that are not well understood. In this work, we use an existing framework for socially mediated metacognition to analyze audiovisual data from think-aloud activities in which eight pairs of students from two institutions attempted to diagnose and repair a malfunctioning electric circuit. In doing so, we provide insight into some of the social metacognitive dynamics that arise during collaborative troubleshooting. We find that students engaged in socially mediated metacognition at multiple key transitions during the troubleshooting process. Reciprocated metacognitive dialogue arose when students were collectively strategizing about which measurements to perform, or reaching a shared understanding of the circuit’s behavior. Our research demonstrates the value of the framework of socially mediated metacognition in providing insight into the nature of collaborative student troubleshooting in the context of electronics. As such, this framework may be a useful resource for future efforts to examine and support the development of student troubleshooting skills in other upper-division laboratory courses.

We explore the overlap of two nationally recognized learning outcomes for physics lab courses, namely, the ability to model experimental systems and the ability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning apparatus. Modeling and troubleshooting are both nonlinear, recursive processes that involve using models to inform revisions to an apparatus. To probe the overlap of modeling and troubleshooting, we collected audiovisual data from think-aloud activities in which eight pairs of students from two institutions attempted to diagnose and repair a malfunctioning electrical circuit. We characterize the cognitive tasks and model-based reasoning that students employed during this activity. In doing so, we demonstrate that troubleshooting engages students in the core scientific practice of modeling.

In this paper, we seek to evaluate the extent to which students can follow a deductive reasoning chain when it is presented to them. A great deal of instruction in introductory physics courses is centered on presenting students with a logical argument that starts from first principles and systematically leads to a particular conclusion. This approach to instruction may conflict with current models of how students reason, including dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making. We investigated student ability to follow reasoning chains at several different institutions, across multiple topics that span introductory mechanics and electricity and magnetism. (For the purposes of this study, we operationally define "following" a reasoning chain--either a correct chain or an incorrect chain--as selecting the appropriate conclusion to a given chain.) To accomplish this, we asked students to answer a physics question and provide an explanation for their answer. We then presented them with a reasoning chain generated by a fictitious student and asked them to select the appropriate concluding statement for that chain. Some of these fictitious chains were fully correct, while others contained a conceptual or logical error. We intentionally used tasks for which students would be unlikely to generate correct reasoning chains on their own. We found that for most tasks, students were generally successful at following chains based on common incorrect reasoning. Students who themselves generated the correct reasoning, however, were much more successful at following correct reasoning chains. Connections between this work and dual-process theories, as well as implications for instruction, are discussed.

Because of the focus of introductory physics courses on improving students' problem-solving and reasoning skills, researchers in physics education have been developing and refining theoretical frameworks for how students reason through physics problems. Recently, researchers have begun to apply dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR), from cognitive science and psychology, to support mechanistic predictions of student reasoning in physics. In this article, we employ a novel methodology involving reasoning chain construction tasks in order to test DPToR-based predictions for two physics questions in which salient distracting features have been found to cue incorrect first-available mental models. In a reasoning chain construction task, students respond to a physics question by drawing from a list of reasoning elements (all of which are true) in order to assemble a chain of reasoning that leads to a conclusion. Two sets of experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that students would be unlikely to abandon an incorrect first-available model unless they were provided with information that called into question the satisfactoriness of that model. We found that providing increased access to information relevant to the correct line of reasoning did not produce large differences in student answering patterns. However, providing increased access to information refuting the first-available model did produce large differences in student answering patterns, but only among those students who demonstrated that they possessed the relevant mindware (i.e., conceptual understanding). Our findings are consistent with DPToR and further illustrate the applicability of such reasoning frameworks in the context of physics.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Research in physics education has contributed substantively to improvements in the learning and teaching of university physics by informing the development of research-based instructional materials for physics courses. Reports on the design of these materials have tended to focus on overall improvements in student performance, while the role of theory in informing the development, refinement, and assessment of the materials is often not clearly articulated. In this article, we illustrate how dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making have guided the ongoing development, testing, and analysis of an instructional intervention, implemented at three different institutions, designed to build consistency in student reasoning about the application of Newton's 2nd law to objects at rest. By employing constructs from cognitive science associated with dual-process theories of reasoning (such as mindware and cognitive reflection), we were able not only to examine the overall improvement in student performance but also to investigate the impact of the intervention on two aspects of productive reasoning--mindware and cognitive reflection. Our analysis showed that the intervention strengthened students' mindware such that students were able to apply it as a criterion while checking the validity of their intuitive responses. Moreover, logistic regression revealed that the success of our intervention was mediated by the students' cognitive reflection skills. Indeed, for students with comparable mindware, those who demonstrated a weaker tendency toward cognitive reflection were less likely to initiate conflict detection and therefore never had the opportunity to utilize their mindware. We believe that this kind of integrated, theory-driven approach to intervention design and testing represents an important first step in efforts to both account for and leverage domain-general reasoning phenomena in the learning and teaching of physics.

The research reported in this article represents a systematic, multiyear investigation of student understanding of the behavior of bipolar junction transistor circuits using a variety of different tasks to isolate and probe key aspects of transistor circuit behavior. The participants in this study were undergraduates enrolled in upper-division physics electronics courses at three institutions, as well as undergraduates in upper-division engineering electronics courses at one of the institutions. Findings from this research indicate that many students have not developed a robust conceptual understanding of the functionality of bipolar junction transistors circuits even after all relevant instruction. Most notably, when asked to analyze the impact of a transistor circuit on input signals, students frequently applied reasoning appropriate for an analysis of the circuit's dc bias behavior. However, students often displayed knowledge of fundamental transistor behavior when responding to more targeted questions. This article provides insight into student thinking about transistor circuits, describing the most prevalent conceptual and reasoning difficulties identified and discussing some important implications for instruction.

A growing body of scholarly work indicates that student performance on physics problems stems from many factors, including relevant conceptual understanding. However, in contexts in which significant conceptual difficulties have been documented via research, it can be difficult to pinpoint and isolate such factors because students' written and interview responses rarely reveal the full richness of their conscious and, perhaps more importantly, subconscious reasoning paths. In this investigation, informed by dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making as well as the theoretical construct of accessibility, we conducted a series of experiments in order to gain greater insight into the factors impacting student performance on the "five-block problem," which has been used in the literature to probe student thinking about buoyancy. In particular, we examined both the impact of problem design (including salient features and cueing) and the impact of targeted instruction focused on density-based arguments for sinking and floating and on neutral buoyancy. The investigation found that instructional modifications designed to remove the strong intuitive appeal of the first-available response led to significantly improved performance, without improving student conceptual understanding of the requisite buoyancy concepts. As such, our findings represent an important first step in identifying systematic strategies for using theories from cognitive science to guide the development and refinement of research-based instructional materials.

Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of troubleshooting. However, that work has focused primarily on "individual" students' metacognitive processes or troubleshooting abilities. In contrast, electronics courses often require students to work in "pairs," and hence students' in-class experiences likely have significant social dimensions that are not well understood. In this work, we use an existing framework for socially mediated metacognition to analyze audiovisual data from think-aloud activities in which eight pairs of students from two institutions attempted to diagnose and repair a malfunctioning electric circuit. In doing so, we provide insight into some of the social metacognitive dynamics that arise during collaborative troubleshooting. We find that students engaged in socially mediated metacognition at multiple key transitions during the troubleshooting process. Reciprocated metacognitive dialogue arose when students were collectively strategizing about which measurements to perform, or reaching a shared understanding of the circuit's behavior. Our research demonstrates the value of the framework of socially mediated metacognition in providing insight into the nature of collaborative student troubleshooting in the context of electronics. As such, this framework may be a useful resource for future efforts to examine and support the development of student troubleshooting skills in other upper-division laboratory courses.

We explore the overlap of two nationally recognized learning outcomes for physics lab courses, namely, the ability to model experimental systems and the ability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning apparatus. Modeling and troubleshooting are both nonlinear, recursive processes that involve using models to inform revisions to an apparatus. To probe the overlap of modeling and troubleshooting, we collected audiovisual data from think-aloud activities in which eight pairs of students from two institutions attempted to diagnose and repair a malfunctioning electrical circuit. We characterize the cognitive tasks and model-based reasoning that students employed during this activity. In doing so, we demonstrate that troubleshooting engages students in the core scientific practice of modeling.