Student epistemological framing on paper-based assessments

Abstract

Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e., their epistemologies. Using data from students completing assessment questions during one-on-one think aloud interviews, we explore how assessment features did (or did not) impact student engagement with the assessment problems. We analyze video recordings and transcripts to infer the epistemological framings and resources students use while completing introductory-level physics problems. Students’ framings tended to be fairly stable, but when shifts occurred, they were triggered by a shift in epistemological resource, which can be activated by assessment feature. This work extends existing work on epistemological framing into the realm of assessment and allows us to consider the effects of assessments on our students’ understanding of physics teaching and learning.