Using reasoning chain construction tasks to explore the nature of student reasoning in physics

For more than 30 years, research-based materials developed by the physics education research community have helped improve student learning in introductory physics. An emerging body of research, however, suggests that poor student performance on certain physics tasks – even after research-based instruction – may stem more from the nature of human reasoning itself than from specific conceptual difficulties. As part of a larger, multi-institutional effort to investigate and characterize the nature of student reasoning in physics and to leverage the findings to improve instruction, we have designed research tasks that expressly focus on student construction of qualitative inferential reasoning chains. In an online “chaining” task, students are provided with correct reasoning elements (i.e., true statements about the physical situation as well as correct concepts and mathematical relationships) and are asked to assemble them into an argument in order to answer a physics question. In our work, we have used these chaining tasks in order to better explore the extent to which some reasoning phenomena in physics may be accounted for by dual-process theories of reasoning and decision-making. We have also sought to leverage such theories to impact student performance by manipulating aspects of the chaining task format. In this talk, an overview of these chaining tasks will be provided and results will be used to highlight the role that the nature of human reasoning may play when students work on physics questions.