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ERIC Number: EJ1432106
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-2469-9896
Available Date: N/A
Utilizing Network Analysis to Explore Student Qualitative Inferential Reasoning Chains
Physical Review Physics Education Research, v20 n1 Article 010147 2024
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.
American Physical Society. One Physics Ellipse 4th Floor, College Park, MD 20740-3844. Tel: 301-209-3200; Fax: 301-209-0865; e-mail: assocpub@aps.org; Web site: https://journals.aps.org/prper/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE); National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: 1431940; 1431541; 1431857; 1432052; 1432765; 2142416; 2142276; 2141975; 2142436; 0962805
Author Affiliations: N/A