Exploring Student’s Sensemaking

Abstract: There is a growing interest in implementing reform-based lab courses in undergraduate physics that are student-driven rather than instructor-driven. In these courses, students develop and carry out experiments while simultaneously reasoning about their hypotheses, data collection procedures, collected evidence, and the relevant physics content.  However, there is a limited understanding of how students engage in reasoning in these types of labs. At the University of Utah, a collaboration among faculty from the Department of Physics & Astronomy, School of Biological Sciences, and Department of Educational Psychology has implemented a series of reforms to our Algebra-based introductory physics lab courses that enroll a preponderance of biology majors and pre-health students.  In our reform-based Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) labs, we have implemented 3-dimensional (3D) instruction, and our undergraduates engage in semi-autonomous experimentation with a focus on analyzing and interpreting data.  Within this setting, we have used the theoretical framework of sensemaking to examine the moment-by-moment details of students’ reasoning about a series of conceptual and procedural inconsistencies. We focus on what the inconsistencies are about and how students resolve them using a narrative case study analysis approach of a single group whose sensemaking is largely representative of the observed data corpus. Overall, we find that student sensemaking about conceptual and procedural inconsistencies is generally productive, given students’ resolutions and experimental progress. Capturing detailed sensemaking about inconsistencies highlights the richness of students’ reasoning processes in this understudied learning environment that is becoming more prevalent over time. 

Bio:

Lauren Barth-Cohen (Ph.D. Science and Math Education, University of California, Berkeley) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah.  She also holds an Adjunct Associate Professor position in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. Dr. Barth-Cohen holds a BA in Physics from Smith College and previously held a post-doctoral position at the University of Maine and a Research Faculty position at the University of Miami. Her expertise is in Science Education, and her work cuts across the Learning Sciences and Physics Education Research (PER). Her research focuses on student and teacher learning in the physical sciences. Her work has received over three million in funding from the National Science Foundation.  She is on sabbatical during the '24-'25 academic year and currently based at Uppsala University in Uppsala Sweden.