Understanding Student Sensemaking while solving Physics Problems

Instructors and researchers who focus on student sense-making try to understand 'how' students navigate the problem-solving process. Understanding these mechanisms plays an important role in helping students become good problem solvers. In particular, investigating student sense-making in the context of physics problem-solving can be useful for developing curricula and pedagogies to help students learn. We used individual interviews to investigate student sense-making in upper-level E&M in the context of problems that can be efficiently solved using the method of images as part of the development and validation of a research-based tutorial. Some of the valuable findings using the epistemic game framework proposed by Tuminaro and Redish are presented.