Investigation of context dependence of students' responses to thermodynamics problems and its potential application to dual-process theory research

Dual-process theory investigations in physics education research employ sets of physics problems posed in diverse physical contexts that are all focused on a single specific physics concept. Problems considered easier are used to determine whether students have a basic understanding of the targeted concept (that is, whether they have the requisite "mindware"), while more complex problems—and/or those with salient distracting features—are used to probe students' ability to apply their basic conceptual understanding in a variety of problem settings. However, there have been few systematic studies of the relative challenges posed to students by diverse types of problems targeted on a single physics concept. Our recent investigation in the framework of introductory thermodynamics has explored students' responses to a wide variety of problem types, designed such that 2-5 different problems all target the same physics concept; 13 different thermodynamics concepts serve as the targets. The problems differ from each other by using diverse physical settings and scenarios, as well as various types of potentially distracting features. (Examples: gas compressions and expansions; isothermal, adiabatic, and isochoric processes; with and without PV diagrams; diagrams that display or do not display temperatures or process types explicitly.) I will describe how our results may be applied directly in dual-process theory investigations and how they provide a model for further investigations of this type.