Black and Wittmann on the epistemic games in integration

K.E. Black and M.C. Wittmann
Epistemic Games in Integration: Modeling Resource Choice
Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings 2007.

As part of an ongoing project to understand how mathematics is used in advanced physics to guide one's conceptual understanding of physics, we focus on students' interpretation and use of boundary and initial conditions when solving integrals. We discuss an interaction between two students working on a group quiz problem. After describing the interaction, we briefly discuss the procedural resources that we use to model the students' solutions. We then use the procedural resources introduced earlier to draw resources graphs describing the two epistemic game facets used by the students in our transcript. ©2007 American Institute of Physics

AIP Conf. Proc. -- November 12, 2007 -- Volume 951, pp. 53-56
2007 PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH CONFERENCE; DOI:10.1063/1.2820945

Traxler, Black, and Thompson, PERC Proceedings 2007

Adrienne L. Traxler, Katrina E. Black, and John R. Thompson

Students' Use of Symmetry with Gauss's Law

To study introductory student difficulties with electrostatics, we compared student techniques when finding the electric field for spherically symmetric and non-spherically symmetric charged conductors. We used short interviews to design a free-response and multiple-choice-multiple-response survey that was administered to students in introductory calculus-based courses. We present the survey results and discuss them in light of Singh's results for Gauss's Law, Collins and Ferguson's epistemic forms and games, and Tuminaro's extension of games and frames.

AIP Conf. Proc. -- January 30, 2007 -- Volume 883, pp. 173-176
2006 PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH CONFERENCE; DOI:10.1063/1.2508720