The distribution and change of student expectations in introductory physics

Students not only bring their prior understanding of physics concepts into the classroom, they also bring to their physics class a set of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about the nature of physics knowledge, what the students are to learn, what skills will be required of them, and what they need to do to succeed. These “expectations” can affect not only how students interpret class activities, but also from which of these activities the students build their understanding and the type of understanding they build. We report here on the development of the Maryland Physics Expectations (MPEX) Survey, a Likert-scale survey to probe these expectations. Observations of more than 1000 students at 5 institutions in first semester physics classes show that many students have expectation misconceptions about the nature of physics and what they should be doing to learn it. Furthermore, the effect of the first semester class is to deteriorate rather than improve these expectations.