Differences in students' perceptions of learning physics

Abstract

Recent research on student learning in higher education has highlighted the effect that students' perceptions of the nature of learning and understanding of their discipline has on their consequent understanding of the subject matter. This present project grew out of a programme aimed to help first-year students in physics develop their ideas on the nature of physics and how to study it. One of the issues to emerge from that project was the need to develop a more detailed understanding of students' perceptions, to be used both in further planning of the program and in its evaluation. This paper reports on the results of that study. It involved a before (340 students) and after (110) survey o..