Students thinking during physics problem solving: Identifying the resources with which they learn

COLEONI, ENRIQUE ANDRÉS; BUTELER, LAURA M.

Journal of Science Education

Fundación Revista de Educación en las Ciencias

Año: 2009 vol. 10 p. 10 - 14

0124-5481

The present work explores the metacognitive abilities of students from an introductory university-level physics course, while solving a problem on ray optics. The work is addressed on the basis of the theoretical framework proposed by Hammer, Redish and others (Hammer & Elby, 2003, Hammer et al, 2005), according to which subjects? cognition is the result of the context-sensitive activation of cognitive resources. Following these ideas, students? metacognitive activities are analyzed together with their cognitive productions. Results show some of the metacognitive resources students have and also how these are activated together with other resources. These findings  could enable the design of instruction environments that go beyond the idea of training students to mimic expert behavior.