Wittmann and Morgan on teaching quantum physics to non-science folks

Michael C. Wittmann and Jeffrey T. Morgan

Foregrounding epistemology and everyday intuitions in a quantum physics course for nonscience majors 

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 16, 020159 – Published 4 December 2020 

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] In developing and modifying a course called Intuitive Quantum Physics for nonscience majors, several social and theoretical commitments informed our design decisions. We believed that the goal of a general education course should not be acquiring content knowledge alone, but more generally developing an approach to thinking scientifically. Thus, our course was designed to promote a deeper understanding of the nature of science through careful attention to students’ personal epistemologies. We emphasized everyday situations, be they social activities or personal experiences, as analogies to be used during instruction. We used these everyday events to help students make sense of quantum physics, choosing the topic exactly because it seems otherwise counterintuitive. Through this work, we hoped to help students make connections between complex topics (in this case in science) and their everyday experiences.

Stetzer and many others on leveraging dual-process theories of reasoning

Mila Kryjevskaia, MacKenzie R. Stetzer, Beth A. Lindsey, Alistair McInerny, Paula R. L. Heron, and Andrew Boudreaux 

Designing research-based instructional materials that leverage dual-process theories of reasoning: Insights from testing one specific, theory-driven intervention 

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 16, 020140 – Published 4 December 2020 

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Research in physics education has contributed substantively to improvements in the learning and teaching of university physics by informing the development of research-based instructional materials for physics courses. Reports on the design of these materials have tended to focus on overall improvements in student performance, while the role of theory in informing the development, refinement, and assessment of the materials is often not clearly articulated. In this article, we illustrate how dual-process theories of reasoning and decision making have guided the ongoing development, testing, and analysis of an instructional intervention, implemented at three different institutions, designed to build consistency in student reasoning about the application of Newton’s 2nd law to objects at rest. By employing constructs from cognitive science associated with dual-process theories of reasoning (such as mindware and cognitive reflection), we were able not only to examine the overall improvement in student performance but also to investigate the impact of the intervention on two aspects of productive reasoning—mindware and cognitive reflection. Our analysis showed that the intervention strengthened students’ mindware such that students were able to apply it as a criterion while checking the validity of their intuitive responses. Moreover, logistic regression revealed that the success of our intervention was mediated by the students’ cognitive reflection skills. Indeed, for students with comparable mindware, those who demonstrated a weaker tendency toward cognitive reflection were less likely to initiate conflict detection and therefore never had the opportunity to utilize their mindware. We believe that this kind of integrated, theory-driven approach to intervention design and testing represents an important first step in efforts to both account for and leverage domain-general reasoning phenomena in the learning and teaching of physics.

Barth-Cohen and Wittmann on Crosscutting Concepts as Concepts

Lauren Barth-Cohen and Michael C. Wittmann

Learning About Crosscutting Concepts as Concepts

Despite a growing interest in examining the learning processes involved in three-dimensional science learning, crosscutting concepts are an understudied dimension. We view crosscutting concepts as a type of concept. We argue that crosscutting concepts can be viewed as a kind of concept called a coordination class. We document two types of learning about crosscutting concepts. The first is focused on intuitions that provide a causal explanation, while the second focuses on coherent conceptual systems that are refined over time. In both cases there is an intertwined relationship between multiple crosscutting concepts, with some foregrounded or backgrounded. The results provide a new perspective on three-dimensional science learning that incorporates crosscutting concepts and relevant learning mechanisms.

Barth-Cohen, L. & Wittmann, M. (2020). Learning About Crosscutting Concepts as Concepts. In Gresalfi, M. and Horn, I. S. (Eds.), The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020, Volume 1 (pp. 557-560). Nashville, Tennessee: International Society of the Learning Sciences.