Variations in students’ epistemological beliefs towards physics learning across majors, genders, and university tiers

Students’ epistemological beliefs have been confirmed to influence students’ physics learning in an essential way. The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is an assessment instrument for evaluating students’ beliefs towards physics learning. In the present study, 817 students participate in our investigation with the mandarin CLASS version through three years of the undergraduate program among ten universities in China. We compare student performances on the CLASS across different majors, genders, and university tiers via the three-way analysis of variance. From the results, the main effect of major is found to be statistically significant. Students majoring in education consistently have a better performance of attitudes toward physics learning than those majoring in noneducation, regardless of gender and university tier. There are no main effects of gender and university tier, while the interaction between gender and university tier is detected significantly. No three-way interaction is detected among major, gender, and university tier. Therefore, this paper identifies how students’ epistemological beliefs towards physics learning are related to various disciplines in universities, different genders, and qualitatively dissimilar content learning. For future work, it is worth investigating how students’ epistemological beliefs towards physics learning are affected by the variable of year level and how the variable of year level interacts with major, gender, and university tier. According to the significant effect of major, it will make sense to investigate the correlation between epistemological beliefs and career interests or career expectations in future research.

Figure 1

Students’ overall performances on the CLASS across different majors, genders, and university tiers.

Figure 2

Categories of epistemological beliefs towards physics learning measured by the CLASS. (a) personal interest (PI), (b) real world connection (RWC), (c) problem solving general (PSG), (d) problem solving confidence (PSC), (e) problem solving sophistication (PSS), (f) sense making/effort ($\mathrm{SM}/\mathrm{E}$), (g) conceptual connections (CC), and (h) applied conceptual understanding (ACU). Each data point represents the average score of each group. Error bars represent standard errors.