Comparing introductory and beyond-introductory students' reasoning about uncertainty

TL;DR

This study compares how introductory and advanced physics students reason about uncertainty, revealing that beyond-intro students often demonstrate more expert-like reasoning, but some misconceptions persist across levels.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on the reasoning differences about uncertainty between intro and beyond-intro students in physics labs.

Findings

Beyond-intro students show more expert reasoning in some areas.

Intro and beyond-intro students perform similarly on certain questions.

Variability in responses is not fully explained by experience or coursework.

Abstract

Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro students' ideas about uncertainty. We administered a survey to students at 10 different universities with questions probing procedural reasoning about measurement, student-identified sources of uncertainty, and predictive reasoning about data distributions. We found that intro and beyond-intro students answered similarly on questions where intro students already exhibited expert-level reasoning, such as in comparing two data sets with the same mean but different spreads, identifying limitations in an experimental setup, and predicting how a data distribution would change if more data were collected. For other questions, beyond-intro students generally exhibited more expert-like reasoning than intro students, such as when determining whether two sets of data agree, identifying principles of measurement that contribute to spread, and predicting how a data distribution would change if better data were collected. Neither differences in student populations, lab courses taken, nor research experience were able to fully explain the variability between intro and beyond-intro student responses. These results call for further research to better understand how students' ideas about uncertainty develop beyond the intro level.