PERC 2024 Abstract Detail Page
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| Abstract Title: | Supporting students' productive engagement with difficulties |
|---|---|
| Abstract Type: | Symposium Talk |
| Abstract: | Explicit description of "student difficulties" in PER generally defines them as recurrent, incorrect ideas or patterns of reasoning. The patterns are especially difficult to address when students are not troubled by them; instruction generally begins with eliciting and confronting the incorrect lines of reasoning. It is when students experience the difficulties that they may be motivated to resolve them and make progress toward canonical understanding. That is, within these accounts, students' experiencing difficulties in an essential part of learning. Scholarship on sensemaking has argued for a shift of priories. It attends to students' experiencing difficulties not only as a pedagogical approach toward canonical understanding but as a target of instruction in itself. Physicists, we can all recognize, are professional learners: Their work entails finding, describing, and engaging with gaps and inconsistencies in their own and the field's understanding. Part of a physicists expertise is in self-assessment, in recognizing when something doesn't seem right, and in seeking to pin that down. For students, learning physics must mean, in part, learning to engage in these activities, or as many accounts describe, practices, of finding, describing, and engaging with what they do not know. In recent years, PER has begun to study how students' feelings entangle with what they think of as knowledge and learning, that is with how affect entangles with epistemology; as well as how social interactions and institutional contexts play roles. The dynamics are highly complex and take place on a wide range of scales. For my part in this session, I will present examples from research and teaching that provide evidence of affective, social, and epistemic dynamics, to argue for the importance of this research for PER going forward. |
| Parallel Session: | Learners' engagement in sensemaking |
Author/Organizer Information | |
| Primary Contact: |
David Hammer Departments of Education and Physics & Astronomy, Tufts University |
