Budding Research Paths
Three-Dimensional Learning (3DL) and Conceptual Learning in Physics Labs
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Investigating Students' Various Representational Competencies in Undergraduate Physics Lab Settings
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Recent literature on physics labs has shown that lab courses should shift their learning goals away from reinforcing lecture content to other areas, such as measurement methods, critical thinking, modeling, experimental uncertainty, etc. However, with undergraduate physics labs slowly integrating aspects of three-dimensional learning (3DL), is it possible to engage students in laboratory skills and experimental practices while simultaneously enhancing more conceptual aspects of their science knowledge? This study seeks to identify potential instructional scaffolds in lab settings that may engage students in mechanistic reasoning and sensemaking about underlying conceptual topics within lab course structures.
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Historically, PER studies have focused on enumerating student difficulties when interpreting pre-constructed graphical representation. This study seeks to identify and explicate students' representational and metarepresentational competency (RC and MRC) by identifying: 1) constructive resources, or strategies students enact when constructing representations; 2) critical resources, or strategies students enact when critiquing the appropriateness and effectiveness of self-constructed representations; and 3) epistemological views of the purposes of various modes of representations in experimental contexts.
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Students' Enactment of Epistemic Agency in Physics Lab Courses
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TA/LA Dynamic Shifts in Epistemological Frames |