New Instrument for Measuring Student Beliefs about Physics and Learning Physics: The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey.

By W. Adams, K. Perkins, Noah S. Podolefsky, M. Dubson, Noah Finkelstein, Carl E. Wieman. 2006

697 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is a new instrument designed to measure student beliefs about physics and about learning physics. This instrument extends previous work by probing additional aspects of student beliefs and by using wording suitable for students in a wide variety of physics courses. The CLASS has been validated using interviews, reliability studies, and extensive statistical analyses of responses from over 5000 students. In addition, a new methodology for determining useful and statistically robust categories of student beliefs has been developed. This paper serves as the foundation for an extensive study of how student beliefs impact and are impacted by their educational experiences. For example, this survey measures the following: that most teaching practices cause substantial drops in student scores; that a student's likelihood of becoming a physics major correlates with their ``Personal Interest'' score; and that, for a majority of student populations, women's scores in some categories, including ``Personal Interest'' and ``Real World Connections,'' are significantly different from men's scores.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bdc5b0d6699549e13d9765fa75fcfeba033284f2

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Gender gap on concept inventories in physics: what is consistent, what is inconsistent,and what factors influence the gap? (2013, background): “Also, in both studies (and other studies not discussed here) FCI items 14 [13,34,35] and 23 [13,19,34,35] were found to favor men.”
Development and Validation of Instruments to Measure Learning of Expert‐Like Thinking (2011, background): “See Ding and Beichner (2009), Heller and Huffman (1995), Hestenes and Halloun (1995), Huffman and Heller (1995), and Ramlo (2008) for discussion of factor analysis performed on concept inventories and Adams et al. (2006) for discussion of factor analysis for perception surveys.”
Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering. (2012, background): “• Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), which is designed to compare novice and expert perceptions about the content and structure of a specific discipline, the source of knowledge about that discipline, and the connection of a discipline to the real world (Adams et al., 2006).”
Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom (2019, background): “Research also shows that active teaching strategies increase lecture attendance, engagement, and students ’ acquisition of expert attitudes toward the discipline (3, 7 – 9).”
Synthesis of Discipline-Based Education Research in Physics. (2014, methodology): “One study of scores on CLASS indicate that females have less expertlike beliefs in statements related to categories of real-world connections, personal interest, problemsolving confidence, and problem-solving sophistication than their male peers [509].”
Connecting High School Physics Experiences, Outcome Expectations, Physics Identity, and Physics Career Choice: A Gender Study. (2010, positive): “At a much later stage, the beginning of college/university, Adams et al. (2006) found that first-year college students’ ‘‘personal interest’’ in physics was highly correlated with their subsequent choice of physics as a major. Supporting this finding, a large body of research using the Social Cognit”