From Pathological to Productive: How Introductory Physics Students Reorient to Uncertainty and Confusion

• In Event: 69.019 - Examining Uncertainty as a Construct for Promoting Meaningful Scientific Engagement

Abstract

Recently, science education researchers have attempted to design instruction and learning environments that strategically introduce uncertainty into students’ scientific inquiry. Little is known, however, about how students make sense of these experiences and whether they take them up in productive ways.

Our previous work has examined a student’s drastic transformation from feeling anxious about uncertainty to feeling excited by it, which demonstrated the central role of students’ affective development in learning science. If we want to help students grapple productively with uncertainty, it is vital that we continue to study how they interpret, experience, and manage their feelings around it.

Our current work examines interview data collected from a reformed introductory college physics course. The course was designed to provide ample opportunities for students to grapple with uncertainty, and assessment was intended to support risk-taking: Students were given challenging problems and were encouraged to construct and consider many possible solutions; they got credit on homework for good reasoning regardless of having the correct answer; in labs, students completed a challenge by designing and conducting their own experiments and they were graded according to whether they could clearly explain their procedure and reasonably interpret the results.

We interviewed 5 students about their experiences in this course (four times during their semester). These students represented a range of ability and background, and though we never asked directly about their experience with uncertainty, many of them mentioned it as central to their experience of the course.

We found that students’ experiences with uncertainty and confusion were entangled with their epistemologies—i.e. their sense of what it means to know and learn physics. For example, one student, Sasha, described initially feeling uncomfortable and scared when asked to solve problems that lacked clearly defined paths to the solution: “I feel comfortable with numericals, but when we have questions that want you to think and just wander, I feel uncomfortable. I get a little bit scared because I'm not used to that.” She also remembered feeling ashamed and inadequate in moments of confusion. She said, “I look at a problem set, I read the question, and I'm just like, I don't even know where to begin….And other people around me would start talking about it….and I felt stupid the whole time.” Here we see that Sasha’s feelings about uncertainty and confusion, as well as her own sense of ability and self-worth, were deeply entangled with her epistemological expectations that she should get to the answer quickly and directly. However, as Sasha began to see confusion as fundamental to doing science, she began to experience these feelings as enjoyable: “I like it now. [The professor] keeps pointing that out, like scientists are supposed to be confused. And I think I'm starting to understand where he comes from.”

Looking at cases like Sasha’s can help us understand what supports and promotes students’ productive grappling with uncertainty and confusion. The paper will depict a more extensive exploration of this phenomenon using other cases from our project.

Authors

• Jennifer Radoff, University of Maryland - College Park

• Anna McLean Phillips, Tufts University

• David Hammer, Tufts University