PROCEEDINGS OF THE 23RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2020
Boston, Massachusetts
Physics students’ implicit connections between mathematical ideas
Page: 949
The Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL) aims to assess students’ physics quantitative literacy at the introductory level. PIQL’s design presents the challenge of isolating types of mathematical reasoning that are independent of each other in physics questions. In its current form, PIQL spans three principle reasoning subdomains previously identified in the research literature: ratios and proportions, covariation, and signed (negative) quantities. An important psychometric objective is to test the orthogonality of these three reasoning subdomains. We present results that suggest that students’ responses to PIQL questions do not fit this structure. Groupings of correct responses identified in the data provide insight into the ways in which students’ knowledge may be structured. Moreover, questions with multiple correct responses may have different responses in different data-driven groups, suggesting that the both the answer choice and the context of the question may impact how students (implicitly) relate various ideas.