Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one's existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the…

We studied the impact of metacognitive reflections on recently-completed work as a way to improve the retention of newly learned problem-solving techniques. Students video recorded themselves talking through problems immediately after finishing them, completed ongoing problem-solving strategy maps or problem-sorting exercises, and filled out…

Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e.,…

Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics problems in an upper-division physics course. Using the lens of epistemological framing, we investigated four…

Our field has long valued the goal of teaching students not just the facts of physics, but also the thinking and reasoning skills of professional physicists. The complexity inherent in scientific reasoning demands that we think carefully about how we conceptualize for ourselves, enact in our classes, and encourage in our students the relationship…

The purpose of this paper is to show how important "monitoring" is as metacognitive skills in solving physics problems in the field mechanics. Based on test scores, twenty one students were divided into two groups: more successful (MS) and less successful (LS) problem solvers. Students were allowed to think-aloud while they worked on…

The aim of this study was, first, to investigate any pattern between students' quantitative contribution to argumentation and their science understanding, and second, to analyze any relationship between students' qualitative contribution to argumentation and their scientific knowledge. Participants of the study were four tenth-grade students. The…