This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it’s a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics– Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the findings from the PER field are really interesting.
This particular paper, though, is mostly kind of depressing. The authors, including Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, gave students in three introductory physics classes a survey about their attitudes toward physics. They asked the students to indicate both their own opinion of the question, and also what they thought a physicist would say. They compared the student responses to “expert” responses from a survey of 66 college and university physics professors.
Their main finding was reported in the title: for the most part, students did a very good job of predicting the expert response, agreeing with the real experts roughly 80% of the time. Their personal opinions, though, were considerably less expert-like– 15-20% less.
Some of this is understandable. The questions with the biggest split between “personal” and “physicist” responses included “I enjoy solving physics problems,” and “There are times I solve a physics problem more than one way to help my understanding.” They correctly predict that experts will agree with both statements, but less than 50% of them personally agreed (the one anomaly being the ~60% of students from the calculus-based class who agreed that they liked solving problems). Having both taken and assigned problem sets for introductory physics, it doesn’t surprise me to learn that students don’t particularly enjoy them.
Other findings were also pretty much what you would expect. Students in the calculus-based class agreed more with the experts than students in the algebra-based class (that’s code for “Physics for Pre-Meds”) or the non-science-majors class (“Physics of Sound”). Students with stronger physics backgrounds (AP or IB physics) also tended to agree more with the experts.
A result sure to be of interest to many people at ScienceBlogs is the breakdown by gender. This produced a slightly odd result: on the whole, women were better than men at predicting the expert response, but their personal answers were less expert-like than men’s. I have no idea why this would be the case, and the authors don’t appear to be much better– they basically punt the question with an “additional research is needed” statement.
The depressing result, though, is the comparison of “pre” and “post” scores. Students were given the survey twice, once at the beginning of the class, and again at the end of the class. The “physicist” responses didn’t change much, but the “personal” responses actually got worse by almost 7% in the calculus-based class. The algebra-based course managed not to change, but the non-science-majors class also saw the “personal” scores get significantly worse.
So, basically, taking introductory physics classes makes students think less like a physicist than they did before they started. That’s a cheery thought to throw at somebody teaching introductory physics.
The paper doesn’t try to explain these results in depth– they’re just reporting the findings. They do offer one paragraph worth of speculation, though, which is worth quoting at length:
It appears that the most prominent reasons for students splitting on their responses are (1) believing that physicists would inherently be more interested in physics and aware of physics phenomena, otherwise they would not have gone into the profession, (2) seeing that the greater experience and expertise of physicists would influence their abilities and beliefs, and (3) believing that the kinds of physics problems that students see are less authentic and therefore are perceived differently and approached differently than the sorts of problems a physicist faces, which are seen as being more in depth, involving harder problems, not requiring memorization, and putting more at stake that the student’s homework problems. Other reasons expressed in these preliminary interviews include statements reflecting what students see as most sensible for their personal situation: students saying that they are lazy (their words) in their approaches to problem solving compared to physicists; students saying that while they want to or should take the more expertlike approach, in reality they do not because they do not have the time or need; and students believing physicists, or other people in general, may have a different approach to learning than themselves but not wanting to assume what approach that would be.
That seems pretty much dead on, to me.
The frustrating thing about this paper, like most reports of bad educational results, is that it’s really not clear what should be done about any of this. They refer to some other work (that I don’t have easy access to) showing that students can occasionally be pushed in the more expert-like direction, but don’t say how. As an experimentalist, this drives me nuts.
So, I’ll throw it out here, for the half-dozen people who read this far: What do you think should be done to improve this situation? Or does it even need improving? Is it just one of those things, and what can you do, Jake, it’s Chinatown?
Kara E. Gray, Wendy K. Adams, Carl E. Wieman, Katherine K. Perkins (2008). Students know what physicists believe, but they don’t agree: A study using the CLASS survey Physical Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research, 4 (2) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.4.020106