This Week's Abstract

Francis Stefani

This work, which was the basis for a doctoral dissertation in Science Education at UT, set out to investigate two questions: 1) what is the state of qualitative understanding of magnetism at various stages of expertise? 2) What approaches to problem-solving are used across the spectrum of expertise? We (Francis Stefani and Jill Marshall) studied three groups: ten novices (UT students who had completed one introductory course in electricity and magnetism), ten experts-in-training (upper division and graduate students) and 11 experts (physics professors and national lab researchers). Data collection involved structured interviews during which participants solved a series of non-standard problems in magnetism while thinking out loud. The problems were designed to test for conceptual understanding. The interviews were audio taped, transcribed, and analyzed using a grounded theory approach to doing qualitative research. The talk will explain the methods used, the findings, and what might some implications of the findings for teaching physics.