Using Warrants As a Window to Epistemic Framing

TL;DR

This paper explores how analyzing students' warrants in mathematical reasoning reveals their epistemic framing in physics problem solving, highlighting the connection between their mathematical choices and their understanding of math's role.

Contribution

It introduces a method to examine students' epistemic framing through their warrants, providing a new perspective on how students interpret and utilize mathematics in physics.

Findings

Warrants serve as indicators of students' epistemic framing.

Students' mathematical choices reflect their understanding of math's function in physics.

Analyzing warrants offers insights into students' reasoning processes.

Abstract

Mathematics can serve many functions in physics. It can provide a computational system, reflect a physical idea, conveniently encode a rule, and so forth. A physics student thus has many different options for using mathematics in his physics problem solving. We present a short example from the problem solving work of upper level physics students and use it to illustrate the epistemic framing process: framing because these students are focusing on a subset of their total math knowledge, epistemic because their choice of subset relates to what they see (at that particular time) as the nature of the math knowledge in play. We illustrate how looking for the warrants students use, the often unspoken reasons they think their evidence supports their mathematical claims, serves as a window to their epistemic framing. These warrants provide a powerful, concise piece of evidence of their epistemic framing.