Helping Students Become Proficient Problem Solvers Part II: An Example from Waves

Helping students become proficient problem solvers is one of the primary goals of physics courses. In Part I of this article, we summarized the vast research on problem solving relevant for physics instruction, and here we discuss a concrete example of problem solving in the context of waves from introductory physics. The goal of this research was to investigate how drawing diagrams affects students’ problem-solving performance. An introductory class was broken up into three recitations which received different instructions related to diagrams on their weekly quizzes: one group was provided a diagram, another was asked to draw one, and the third was the comparison group which was given no instructions about diagrams. We find that students who were provided a diagram performed significantly worse than students in the other two groups. Furthermore, we find that irrespective of the condition, students who drew diagrams as part of the problem-solving process performed better overall, despite primarily using a mathematical approach to solving the problem. Lastly, we conducted think-aloud interviews with students who solved the same problem to further understand their solution approaches as well as how drawing a diagram is useful even in situations where a primarily mathematical approach is used.