A Theoretical Framework for Physics Education Research: Modeling Student Thinking

– Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations and through which different theoretical models of student thinking can be compared. Much that is known in the behavioral sciences is robust and observationally based. In this paper, I draw from a variety of fields ranging from neuroscience to sociolinguistics to propose an over-arching theoretical framework that allows us to both make sense of what we see in the classroom and to compare a variety of specific theoretical approaches. My synthesis is organized around an analysis of the individual's cognition and how it interacts with the environment. This leads to a two level system, a knowledge-structure level where associational patterns dominate, and a control-structure level where one can describe expectations and epistemology. For each level, I sketch some plausible starting models for student thinking and learning in physics and give examples of how a theoretical orientation can affect instruction and research. Education research is an applied field. As educators, we want to understand how teaching and learning works in order to be able to teach our students more effectively. As scientists, we would like to do this using a scientific approach that combines observation, analysis, and synthesis like the one that has been so effective in helping us make sense of the physical world. Such a synthesis helps transform a collection of independent " facts " into a coherent science, capable of evaluating, refining, and making sense of our accumulated experimental data. However, education research differs from traditional physics research in that in education our goals often dominate our view of the system we are trying to understand. * We never want to lose sight of our goals, but we very much want to treat our system scientifically in order to understand how it functions. Indeed, if we better understand how the system functions, we can better articulate and refine our goals. Moreover, we might be able to explain just what it is that highly successful teachers do and transform what is presently an art into a teachable science. At present, despite a few researchers who discuss theoretical frames, research and development in education is strongly dominated by observation and by direct educational goals: " What do we have to do to …