Investigating the efficacy of attending to reflexive cognitive processes in the context of Newton’s second law

Even after research-based instruction, students who demonstrate the ability to assemble relevant conceptual knowledge on one physics question may have difficulty assembling that same knowledge on a closely related problem. Recent research has suggested that reflexive, bottom-up reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to the physics concepts themselves may be responsible for these difficulties. Research has also suggested that attending to these reflexive processes during instruction may improve performance to a greater degree than attending solely to top-down, reflective thinking. Leveraging these findings to meaningfully improve instruction is important. We have, therefore, investigated the impact of training focused on Newton’s second law targeted at reflexive reasoning processes and compared results to a more standard reflective approach to the same topic. We find that an approach targeted toward reflexive reasoning processes improves performance on a difficult physics question to the same or greater degree as a typical reflective approach. Furthermore, we find that many students whose performance on a difficult physics question increased after the reflexive training also explained correct conceptual reasoning on that question, suggesting that conceptual understanding was bolstered by the bottom-up, reflexive training.

Figure 1

Diagrams given to students for (a) the screening question and (b) the target questions of the two-box friction task.

Figure 2

The second of three questions in the pre- and post-test for this experiment. The first question posed on the test is the screening question shown in Fig. 1 and the third question is the target question shown in Fig. 1.

Figure 3

The figures for the three tasks given in the reflective condition. In each case, the student was asked to find the magnitude of the force of friction, the spring force, or the force applied by the hand. After all three questions were answered, a follow-up question asked the student to consider why certain information was not needed to determine these forces.

Figure 4

Examples of the flow of questions posed in the reflexive training condition. Students received 10 of each of the three question types (Box A, B, and (C) in randomized order with the values of the numbers changed on each iteration.

Figure 5

Bar charts showing the percentage of students in each condition that achieved a specific difference score.