Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Examining Student Reasoning In Introductory Physics: Reversing The Chain, William S. Johnson

Honors College

While physics education researchers have investigated student conceptual understanding of specific topics in physics for over thirty years, much less is known about the ability of students to construct qualitative inferential reasoning chains. Such reasoning chains are ubiquitous in scaffolded, research-based instructional materials. As part of a multi-institutional effort to develop instruments to probe student reasoning skills, this thesis describes an investigation into whether the direction of a question can influence the ability of the students to construct correct reasoning chains. Reasoning reversal tasks were administered to introductory calculus-based physics students at the University of Maine. Students were randomly presented …