Author:

Keywords:

LESEC_CON, Social Sciences, Education & Educational Research, Education, Scientific Disciplines, STUDENT DIFFICULTIES, KINEMATICS, KNOWLEDGE, DIAGRAMS, MIRROR, GRAPHS, 1302 Curriculum and Pedagogy, Education, 3901 Curriculum and pedagogy

Abstract:

In this paper, we examine student success on three variants of a test item given in different representational formats (verbal, pictorial, and graphical), with an isomorphic problem statement. We confirm results from recent papers where it is mentioned that physics students' problem-solving competence can vary with representational format and that solutions can be triggered by particular details of the representation. Previous studies are complemented with a fine grained analysis of solution strategies. We find that students use different problem-solving strategies, depending on the representational format in which the problem is stated. © 2012 American Physical Society.