EPISTEMOLOGICAL BELIEFS IN INTRODUCTORY PHYSICS

Students' beliefs about knowledge and learning in a domain may have a significant effect on how they approach the material and on what they learn. This article describes a study of such epistemological beliefs in the context of an introductory physics course. I interviewed 6 students, meeting several times with each over one semester. The interviews involved a variety of conversations and tasks closely tied to the course. Through the development and use of an analytic framework, it was possible to characterize subjects' beliefs. The framework consisted of three dimensions: 1. Beliefs about the structure of physics knowledge as (a) a collection of isolated pieces of (b) a single coherent system. 2. Beliefs about the content of physics knowledge as (a) formulas or (b) concepts that underlie the formulas. 3. Beliefs about learning physics, whether it means (a) receiving information or (b) involves an active process of reconstructing one's understanding. The characterizations satisfied criteria of evident involvement in the subjects' work in the course and of consistency, across interviewing tasks as well as across physics content. That it was possible to construct such characterizations in individual case studies supports the validity of epistemological beliefs as a theoretical perspective by which to understand student reasoning.