Education and Physics

Epistemological beliefs are beliefs about knowledge and learning. In a physics class, for example, some students might believe learning consists of memorizing facts and formulas provided by the teacher, whereas others might believe it entails applying and modifying their conceptualizations of phenomena. This article explores, in the context of a debate about velocity from the author's high school physics class, how a perspective of students as having epistemological beliefs might influence a teacher's perceptions of students and intentions for instruction. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Abstract: This symposium addresses methodological issues in studying children's knowledge and learning processes. The class of methods discussed here looks at processes of learning in fine-grained detail, through which a theoretical framework evolves rather than is merely applied. This class of methodological orientations to studying learning processes diverges from more common ones in several important ways: 1) Attention to diverse features of the learning interaction; 2) conducting a moment-by-moment analysis, ...