Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptual knowledge structures through term association times

Details Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptual knowledge structures through term association times Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptual knowledge structures through term association times

2007-02-14

arxiv.org/abs/physics/0702111v1

Physics

Physics Education

26 pages, 10 figures

Scientific paper

Traditional problem-based exams are not efficient instruments for assessing the "structure" of physics students' conceptual knowledge or for providing diagnostically detailed feedback to students and teachers. We present the Free Term Entry task, a candidate assessment instrument for exploring the connections between concepts in a student's understanding of a subject. In this task, a student is given a general topic area and asked to respond with as many terms from the topic area as possible in a given time; the "thinking time" between each term-entry event is recorded along with the response terms. The task was given to students from two different introductory physics classes. Response term thinking times were found to correlate with the strength of the association between two concepts. In addition, sets of thinking times from the task show distinct, characteristic patterns which might prove valuable for student assessment. We propose a quantitative dynamical model named the Matrix Walk Model which is able to match many aspects of the observed data. One particular feature of the data -- a distinct "spike" superimposed on the otherwise log-normal distribution of most thinking time sets -- has not been fit. The spike, other patterns observed in the data, and the proposed phenomenological model could all benefit from a grounding in cognitive theory.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptual knowledge structures through term association times does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptual knowledge structures through term association times, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptual knowledge structures through term association times will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-210081