Surveying Graduate Students' Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving

TL;DR

This survey study compares graduate students' attitudes towards problem solving in physics with those of undergraduates and faculty, revealing nuanced differences in expertise levels across different educational stages.

Contribution

It develops and validates a new survey instrument to assess attitudes towards problem solving among physics graduate students and compares their responses across different levels.

Findings

Graduate students' responses are less expert-like than faculty for introductory physics.

Graduate students' responses are more expert-like than undergraduates for introductory physics.

Graduate-level problem solving responses are similar to introductory students' responses.

Abstract

Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey by expanding the Attitudes towards Problem Solving survey of Marx and Cummings and administered it to physics graduate students. Comparison of their responses to the survey questions about problem solving in their own graduate level courses vs. problem solving in the introductory physics courses provides insight into their expertise in introductory and graduate level physics. The physics graduate students' responses to the survey questions were also compared with those of introductory physics and astronomy students and physics faculty. We find that, even for problem solving in introductory physics, graduate students' responses to some survey questions are less expert-like than those of the physics faculty. Comparison of survey responses of graduate students and introductory students for problem solving in introductory physics suggests that graduate students' responses are in general more expert-like than those of introductory students. However, survey responses suggest that graduate-level problem solving by graduate students on several measures has remarkably similar trends to introductory-level problem solving by introductory students.