Epistemological framing and strategy use during answer-checking

Author / Creator

PERC SM21 (2021)

Conferences

PERC SM21 Poster Session 1A (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

Answer checking is widely recognized as an important part of the problem-solving process. Yet, many instructors find it difficult to teach students to adopt successful and sophisticated answer chec...

Answer checking is widely recognized as an important part of the problem-solving process. Yet, many instructors find it difficult to teach students to adopt successful and sophisticated answer checking strategies, such as dimensional analysis or checking the limits of resulting expressions. An open question is whether students' difficulty with answer checking is purely due to cognitive barriers, or whether motivation or epistemological framing also plays a role. In this study, we examined students' epistemologies when engaged in an answer checking task. We found that more advanced students not only used more sophisticated strategies to check an answer to a static equilibrium problem but that they were also more likely to view answer checking from a conceptual frame while more novice students viewed answer-checking as an algorithmic task. We also found that more advanced students spent more time forming and checking predictions, while more novice students spent their time accumulating pieces of information. Unlike previous work on student epistemologies, our work suggests that answer-checking requires frequent shifting of epistemological frames, which could plausibly explain the difficulty that more novice students have to engage in this task. Our findings generally align with expectations but point to the need for more work studying student epistemologies when engaged in different types of physics tasks.

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