Splits Between Student and Expert Attitudes and Beliefs about Physics Amy Lytle Introduction Most in the field of physics education research believe that student attitudes and beliefs have a strong effect on how students will learn and are interested to know how and why Also educators often have implicit or explicit goals of teaching students something about the nature of science and learning and the role of physics in everyday life among other things which E F Redish calls the hidden curriculum 1 In order to assess what effect student beliefs will have on their performance or evaluate the effectiveness of teaching goals which aim to shape student belief researchers in the field have created surveys that may be implemented easily in the classroom 2 4 The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey CLASS was developed by researchers at the University of Colorado for the purpose of extending on previous surveys which probe student attitudes and beliefs 5 6 With the Maryland Physics Expectations MPEX survey 2 Redish and fellow researchers showed that unless the elements of the hidden curriculum are attended to specifically in the course students will generally develop attitudes which move further away from those their teachers hope to develop They conjectured that students may need to develop attitudes and practices different from the more sophisticated attitudes of experts in the field in order to succeed Traditionally taught courses may in fact produce a split between what students learn to do and what they actually believe McCaskey et al 7 used the content assessment survey the Force Concept Inventory FCI in an effort to probe the effects on assessment due to splits between belief and understanding To do this they asked students to complete the survey twice first according to what they really believe and then according to how they thought a scientist would answer The students they tested indicate splits in belief on many of the questions The evidence of so many splits on student s beliefs about the content of physics suggests there would also be many splits in students attitudes about learning physics In this paper I examine the results of the CLASS in which students were asked to answer its questions in two different ways according to what they believe and according to how they think a physicist would answer Specifically I look at discrepancies between the students answers in these two perspectives and how accurately students were able to predict expert 1 opinions I discuss the significance of the discrepancies in light of others research on the differences between expert and novice attitudes and beliefs Data The CLASS survey was administered to a large university algebra based introductory physics course with an enrollment of approximately 175 students The majority of the students were pre med related majors many in the life sciences The data consist of aggregate data collected from the post results of the CLASS survey given in this course in which the students were asked to answer survey questions in two ways first according to their own beliefs and second according to how they believe a physicist might answer Each response falls into one of the five Likert scale responses strongly agree agree neutral disagree strongly disagree In addition there are video recordings of interviews with five of the students from the class in which the interviewer goes through each question of the survey asking students to answer in these two different ways and to clarify both their interpretation of the question and why there might be differences in the student s own beliefs in comparison with the student s predictions of a physicist s beliefs Among the students interviewed there are three women and two men most of whom are in the first or second year All of the students were enrolled in the course in order to satisfy a requirement for a major other than physics The interviewer asked each student a similar set of questions about his year major whether he enjoyed the lectures and labs how he studied and how much time he typically spent per week working on the class The interviewer then asked each student to go through each question on the survey to answer in the two different ways described above and to provide a brief explanation for how she came to her decisions The raw data are included as an appendix including the CLASS questions the expert responses and the numbers of each type of response by the students for each of the two ways they answered the questions Analysis For clarity in analysis of the data the students responses will be simplified as follows there will be no distinction made between strongly dis agree and dis agree leaving only three categories of responses overall agreement overall disagreement and neutral The CLASS was 2 administered to a group of experts 5 in order to define the expert response for each question In order to examine the splits between a student response and the expert response to each question I have plotted only the questions for which the expert response was overall agree or overall disagree leaving out the three questions on which the expert response was neutral 7 24 and 29 These specific questions are examined in a different way below This way the student responses will either be favorable indicating the same as the expert response unfavorable indicating the opposite of the expert response or neutral a 100 What a physicist would say 80 What students believe favorable responses favorable responses 100 60 40 80 60 40 20 20 0 0 0 20 40 60 80 unfavorable responses 100 b 0 20 40 60 80 unfavorable responses 100 Fig 1 A summary of student responses to the CLASS indicating the percentage of favorable and unfavorable responses for each question a What students thought a physicist would say and b what student themselves believe Figure 1 shows a summary of students responses to the questions on the CLASS Each point represents one question of the survey with the vertical axis showing the percentage of favorable responses to the question and the horizontal axis showing the percentage of unfavorable responses The horizontal line represents where the points would lie if all of the responses were either favorable or unfavorable The distance of each point from the diagonal line then represents the number of neutral responses Figure 1a displays students answers according to what they think a physicist would say and Figure 1b displays students own beliefs Out of the 35