PERC 2019 Abstract Detail Page
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| Abstract Title: | An Exploration of Students' Concept Images of Ordinary Differential Equations |
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| Abstract: | Modeling phenomena with ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is fundamental to physics. In the context of a project studying upper-division physics students' knowledge of ODEs, we identified various concept images. A concept image (Tall and Vinner, 1981) is a student's collective understanding of a topic. Several semesters' worth of graded and ungraded tasks were classified into a succinct coding scheme. Our preliminary findings suggest that students' concept images did not always include the formal mathematical definition: an equation relating a function and its derivatives. Further, when asked to generate a plausible physical situation from an ODE, students were mostly cued by the presence of recognizable symbols (e.g. lambda for wavelength) rather than the functional relationships in the ODE itself. In the future, we aim to construct more comprehensive concept images via improved questionnaires and interviews. This work is supported by the NSF (Grant: PHYS-1405616) and by the Dan Black Family Foundation. |
| Abstract Type: | Contributed Poster Presentation |
| Session Time: | Poster Session I |
| Poster Number: | A87 |
Author/Organizer Information | |
| Primary Contact: |
Anderson Fung California State University, Fullerton 800 N State College Blvd. Fullerton, CA 92831 |
| Co-Author(s) and Co-Presenter(s) |
Michael Loverude (California State University, Fullerton) |
