Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices

Students’ ability to effectively study for an exam, or to manage their time during an exam, is related to their metacognitive capacity. Prior research has demonstrated the effective use of metacognitive strategies during learning and retrieval is related to content expertise. Students also make judg...

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Autores principales:	Witat Fakcharoenphol, Jason W. Morphew, José P. Mestre
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	American Physical Society 2015
Materias:	Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Physics QC1-999
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/fb0feaff8409439aa40c8e66c5324902
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:fb0feaff8409439aa40c8e66c53249022021-12-02T11:51:54ZJudgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.0201281554-9178https://doaj.org/article/fb0feaff8409439aa40c8e66c53249022015-10-01T00:00:00Zhttp://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.020128http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.020128https://doaj.org/toc/1554-9178Students’ ability to effectively study for an exam, or to manage their time during an exam, is related to their metacognitive capacity. Prior research has demonstrated the effective use of metacognitive strategies during learning and retrieval is related to content expertise. Students also make judgments of their own learning and of problem difficulty to guide their studying. This study extends prior research by investigating the accuracy of novices’ and experts’ ability to judge problem difficulty across two experiments; here “accuracy” refers to whether or not their judgments of problem difficulty corresponds with actual exam performance in an introductory mechanics physics course. In the first experiment, physics education research (PER) experts judged the difficulty of introductory physics problems and provided the rationales behind their judgments. Findings indicate that experts use a number of different problem features to make predictions of problem difficulty. While experts are relatively accurate in judging problem difficulty, their content expertise may interfere with their ability to predict student performance on some question types. In the second experiment novices and “near experts” (graduate TAs) judged which question from a problem pair (taken from a real exam) was more difficult. The results indicate that judgments of problem difficulty are more accurate for those with greater content expertise, suggesting that the ability to predict problem difficulty is a trait of expertise which develops with experience.Witat FakcharoenpholJason W. MorphewJosé P. MestreAmerican Physical SocietyarticleSpecial aspects of educationLC8-6691PhysicsQC1-999ENPhysical Review Special Topics. Physics Education Research, Vol 11, Iss 2, p 020128 (2015)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Physics QC1-999
spellingShingle	Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Physics QC1-999 Witat Fakcharoenphol Jason W. Morphew José P. Mestre Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices
description	Students’ ability to effectively study for an exam, or to manage their time during an exam, is related to their metacognitive capacity. Prior research has demonstrated the effective use of metacognitive strategies during learning and retrieval is related to content expertise. Students also make judgments of their own learning and of problem difficulty to guide their studying. This study extends prior research by investigating the accuracy of novices’ and experts’ ability to judge problem difficulty across two experiments; here “accuracy” refers to whether or not their judgments of problem difficulty corresponds with actual exam performance in an introductory mechanics physics course. In the first experiment, physics education research (PER) experts judged the difficulty of introductory physics problems and provided the rationales behind their judgments. Findings indicate that experts use a number of different problem features to make predictions of problem difficulty. While experts are relatively accurate in judging problem difficulty, their content expertise may interfere with their ability to predict student performance on some question types. In the second experiment novices and “near experts” (graduate TAs) judged which question from a problem pair (taken from a real exam) was more difficult. The results indicate that judgments of problem difficulty are more accurate for those with greater content expertise, suggesting that the ability to predict problem difficulty is a trait of expertise which develops with experience.
format	article
author	Witat Fakcharoenphol Jason W. Morphew José P. Mestre
author_facet	Witat Fakcharoenphol Jason W. Morphew José P. Mestre
author_sort	Witat Fakcharoenphol
title	Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices
title_short	Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices
title_full	Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices
title_fullStr	Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices
title_full_unstemmed	Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices
title_sort	judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices
publisher	American Physical Society
publishDate	2015
url	https://doaj.org/article/fb0feaff8409439aa40c8e66c5324902
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Judgments of physics problem difficulty among experts and novices

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