Students' collective understanding during a physics tutorial alternates repeatedly between two distinct interpretations of tickertape distance rather than changing once¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 2 studies · 2 qualitative r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2012 · 1 of 2 entries checked against their sources (automated) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? A group of four university physics students alternated between interpreting strip distance as indicating time and as indicating speed, regenerating each understanding multiple times rather than settling on one. → Frank 2012

q2 i? A group of four college students repeatedly alternated between interpreting strip distance as conveying time and as conveying speed, and did not clearly resolve the issue during the instructional period. → Frank 2009

Evidence¶

Frank 2012¶

Frank, B. W., and Scherr, R. E. (2012). Interactional processes for stabilizing conceptual coherences in physics. Submitted to PRST-PER. https://journals.aps.org/prper/ doi:10.1103/physrevstper.8.020101

q2 · i? · qualitative · r2

Video analysis of two vignettes from a group of four students in an introductory university physics tutorial on tickertape representations of motion. The analysis documents that "their understanding seems to alternate between two distinct ways of making sense of the strips," with the time-interpretation recurring at 11:20 after the speed-interpretation emerged.

"Students do not change their thinking on the matter only one time. In particular, it does not seem that the students decide on a particular interpretation of distance (as indicating time, or as indicating speed). Instead, their understanding seems to alternate between two distinct ways of making sense of the strips of paper as representations of motion."

Frank 2009¶

Frank, B. W. (2009). Multiple Conceptual Coherences in the Speed Tutorial: Micro-processes of Local Stability. https://eric.ed.gov

q2 · i? · the article prints no effect size for this finding · qualitative · r2

Case study of one group of four students in an introductory physics tutorial, based on transcript vignettes. The article reports that after initially deciding shorter strips take less time, the students regenerated the speed interpretation, then a student was again convinced of the earlier idea, showing "their understanding seems to vary between these two distinct ways of making sense of the strips."

"It turns out that the students don’t change their thinking on the matter this one time. Several minutes after the end of the above transcript, Beth brings up again the idea that the shorter strips take less time."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

- - A network of three mutually overlapping intuitive ideas (less distance implies less time, bunched up means faster, faster implies less time) stabilizes students' initial thinking — related - Coordinating attention between whole-strip length and dot spacing does not disrupt and may stabilize the idea that shorter strips take less time — related - Synchronized collective behaviors oriented to strips and worksheets dynamically stabilize the students' initial activity and thinking — related - Changes in the constraints of activity (attention, object location, interaction patterns) provide opportunities for new locally stable patterns of thinking to take hold — related - The physical stability of material artifacts such as stacked tickertape strips and worksheets stabilizes students' attention, action, and knowledge use — related - Contextual micro-features (worksheet wording, salient length differences, matching part-whole structure) support persistence of the less-distance-implies-less-time intuition — related - The colloquial ambiguity of the words short and long in a worksheet question sustains the intuition that less distance implies less time — related - Co-construction of shared understanding needed to be accompanied by students' personal construction and sense making for conceptual change to be stable over time — related - Linguistic coherence predicts productive collaboration, strengthened by joint visual attention data — related - One student asked for a disciplinary explanation twelve times during a 53-minute problem-solving process without anyone clarifying it sufficiently — related - Material arrangement of artifacts (strips centered and ordered by length, worksheets held close) affords and stabilizes the initial pattern of activity; later decentralization enables new patterns — related