Conceptual understanding is one metric that has been historically valued in PER and in the assessment of physics-education-research-based instructional materials. Attending to COnceptual Resources iN (ACORN) Physics Tutorials are instructional materials that are based on research that identifies common conceptual resources—good ideas or “seeds of science” which can be developed into more sophisticated scientific understanding. For this study, we used pre- and post-tests and classroom video to assess students’ conceptual understanding as they completed an ACORN Physics Tutorial about electric circuits. We present the results of our analysis in this talk. 

This talk reviews two historical threads of research in physics problem solving.  Thread 1 focuses on classifying and teaching students to (re)produce expert solution methods.  Work within thread 1 has focused on expert knowledge and strategies, training students to learn expert-like problem-solving methods, and algebraic and computational difficulties.  Thread 2 focuses on the role of problem solving in the practice of learning and understanding physics.  In contrast to an emphasis on producing solutions, thread 2 focuses on the formal and informal ideas used in physics problem solving and how problem solving connects to other aspects of physics learning. After summarizing major research areas within these two threads, both will be discussed in terms of how they relate to adaptive expertise and interpret the key question of transfer.  Finally, open questions for future problem-solving research will be raised.  An elaborated version of this review is available as a chapter in the International Handbook of Physics Education Research: Learning Physics. 

Reasoning on qualitative physics problems is usually expected to be deductive in nature – one might start with first principles and then add contextual information about the problem to derive conclusions specific to the given scenario. Students often find this process difficult. Reasoning chain construction tasks, or chaining tasks, have been used to study student reasoning skills and examine different theoretical models of reasoning. In a chaining tasks, a student is given a series of reasoning elements and asked to assemble the elements into a chain of reasoning that leads to a specific conclusion on a physics task, thus highlighting the underlying deductive process. In the context of an algebra-based physics 2 course, we used an online chaining task followed with an in-class discussion of the results to promote a deeper understanding of how reasoning chains are used in physics. Key insights related to student's understanding of the reasoning process will be discussed.

Online reasoning chain construction tasks have been used to study patterns in student qualitative reasoning and to test predications based in dual-process theories of reasoning. Here, we use the resources framework to develop a reasoning chain construction task aimed at probing the development of algebraic procedural resources. Previous studies have suggested that as mathematical fluency increases, students move from step-by-step procedures ("cancel", "divide", "subtract") to more reified cognitive constructs that incorporates each step into a single resource (such as "separate variables"). Furthermore, it is suggested that as mathematical fluency increases, operations become more gestural and visual in nature ("move this to that side") rather than strictly operational ("subtract x from both sides"). We therefore created a chaining task which includes both types of elements, some including gestural language, and some including operational language, and distributed the task to populations of differing mathematical backgrounds and confidence levels. Results of this study will be shared.