Strategies adopted by undergraduate physics students when modelling solutions to hands-on tasks

Fearon, John Edward

Strategies adopted by undergraduate physics students when modelling solutions to hands-on tasks

Doctoral Thesis

2014

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Physics

Faculty

Faculty of Science

Abstract

Over the last three to four decades there has been a focus on the role of models and modelling in physics education. At the same time, there has also been a move away from the use of recipe-style tasks in physics laboratories to inquiry-based problem solving. From the ensuing research, model-based views of physics have emerged which have contributed to the fields of pedagogy as well as epistemology; the contribution depending on whether the research interest has been that of education or philosophy of science. And while there is still some consensus seeking on the nature and definitions of modelling, there has in recent years been a shift to research questions that consider how models are constructed by students when engaged in hands-on tasks. Model-based instruction courses have been researched at length, but there is a perceived gap in the research that considers the hands-on strategies that are actually employed by 1st-year university students who are in a teaching and learning environment in which the physics curriculum emphasises the modelling of real world systems. This study contributes to this research area in that it investigates the strategies students actually adopt when engaged in student-driven, hands-on laboratory tasks and interprets those strategies in terms of a particular model-based view of physics; a model-based view that posits that the processes of modelling are those of the particularisation and application of physics theory, the idealisation and approximation of real world phenomena, and the eventual realisation of a conceptual model.

Description

Includes bibliographical references.

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

Full item page