How physics instruction impacts students' beliefs about learning physics: A meta-analysis of 24 studies

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How physics instruction impacts students’ beliefs about learning physics: A meta-analysis of 24 studies

Adrian Madsen, Sarah B. McKagan, and Eleanor C. Sayre

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 11, 010115 – Published 2 June 2015

Abstract

In this meta-analysis, we synthesize the results of 24 studies using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and the Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) to answer several questions: (1) How does physics instruction impact students’ beliefs? (2) When do physics majors develop expert-like beliefs? and (3) How do students’ beliefs impact their learning of physics? We report that in typical physics classes, students’ beliefs deteriorate or at best stay the same. There are a few types of interventions, including an explicit focus on model-building and (or) developing expertlike beliefs that lead to significant improvements in beliefs. Further, small courses and those for elementary education and nonscience majors also result in improved beliefs. However, because the available data oversamples certain types of classes, it is unclear whether these improvements are actually due to the interventions, or due to the small class size, or student populations typical of the kinds of classes in which these interventions are most often used. Physics majors tend to enter their undergraduate education with more expertlike beliefs than nonmajors and these beliefs remain relatively stable throughout their undergraduate careers. Thus, typical physics courses appear to be selecting students who already have strong beliefs, rather than supporting students in developing strong beliefs. There is a small correlation between students’ incoming beliefs about physics and their gains on conceptual mechanics surveys. This suggests that students with more expertlike incoming beliefs may learn more in their physics courses, but this finding should be further explored and replicated. Some unanswered questions remain. To answer these questions, we advocate several specific types of future studies: measuring students’ beliefs in courses with a wider range of class sizes, student populations, and teaching methods, especially large classes with very innovative pedagogy and small classes with more typical pedagogy; analysis of the relationship between students’ beliefs and conceptual understanding including a wide variety of variables that might influence each; and analysis of large data sets from a variety of classes that track individual students rather than averaging over classes.

Received 21 March 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010115

This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Adrian Madsen¹, Sarah B. McKagan¹, and Eleanor C. Sayre²

¹American Association of Physics Teachers, College Park, Maryland 20740, USA
²Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas 66506, USA

Article Text

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Issue

Vol. 11, Iss. 1 — January - June 2015

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Images

Figure 1
Shifts in percent expertlike on CLASS or MPEX scores from pre- to post-test based on direction of the shift. Numbers next to bars indicate the number of students in the study. Error bars represent standard error. Error bars were not available for all studies. Green bars indicate that the MPEX or MPEX-II was used. In all other cases the CLASS was used. $PET = Physics$ of Everyday Thinking curriculum, $PSET = Physical$ Science of Everyday Thinking curriculum.
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Figure 2
Shifts in percent expertlike on CLASS or MPEX by teaching method. Courses taught with traditional and reformed methods showed varying levels of positive and negative shifts. Courses that paid some attention to developing beliefs had no shift. Those that put a major focus on developing positive beliefs had positive shifts. Courses that explicitly focused on model building also had positive shifts. One small study of learning assistants found that these students also had a positive shift in beliefs. Classification of courses was determined by authors based on description of course provided in paper. $PET = Physics$ of Everyday Thinking curriculum, $PSET = Physical$ Science of Everyday Thinking curriculum.
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Figure 3
Shifts in CLASS or MPEX by class size. The average shift for small classes is positive and for large classes is negative. There is a bar for each unique course at a given institution taught with a given teaching method. In the case of the same course taught for multiple semesters, we used a weighted average to combine the results and display as a single bar. The total number of students is used as the class size for large lecture courses where students attended smaller lab or recitation sections. There were several studies where the total number of students and number of course sections were reported. Here we found the average class size by dividing the total number of students by the number of sections.
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Figure 4
Shifts in CLASS or MPEX by student population. Nearly all student population categories include courses with both positive and negative shifts on the CLASS and MPEX, with the exception of courses for elementary education majors and courses for both elementary education majors and nonscience majors, where all but one of the shifts are positive.
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Figure 5
Pretest percent expertlike scores versus shifts on CLASS and MPEX with data points grouped by teaching method.
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Figure 6
Pretest percent expertlike scores versus shifts on CLASS and MPEX with data points grouped by student population.
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