Examining student reasoning: A study with students at a Historically Black University

Physics education researchers agree that the field would benefit from investigations conducted with diverse student populations. This project examines physics teaching and student learning at a Historically Black University, thus contributing to a sparse body of research with this underrepresented population. The first phase involved presenting questions designed to disentangle conceptual understanding, reasoning, and intuition reported in the literature to an HBCU classroom. The “screening” question was intended to probe whether students had developed the necessary physics knowledge. The following “target” question required applying the same knowledge in a situation that elicits strongly appealing incorrect intuitive responses. The results revealed that our students performed significantly worse than students in the original studies. To explore several possible explanations in the next phase of the project, we developed an intervention with scaffolding to prime students' use of existing physics knowledge. With the scaffolding question, HBCU student performance improved significantly. Moreover, reasoning patterns observed in the prior studies appear to be replicated with the HBCU student population. Implications for instruction and research will be discussed.