UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

Michael Wittmann, The University of Maine

“Using a knowledge-in-pieces resources framework to organize our knowledge of learning in physics”

As a physicist who leaned toward theory, I can’t help but be interested in the theories of education research and how they help us understand teaching and learning. One theory, the knowledge-in-pieces resources framework, describes small-grain ideas or procedures which are useful when solving a problem. I will describe several examples of the ways that the resources framework can help us analyze content knowledge and reasoning in physics. Topics include mechanical wave propagation and superposition, the use of mathematical integration in an intermediate mechanics course, and middle school teacher knowledge of students’ ideas about energy. Empirical settings have included the analysis of written data, the modeling of student discourse during problem solving, and ethnographic video data gathered when I was a participant in the teacher professional development community being studied. The breadth of the model’s applicability suggests its value in education research as a whole and in physics education research in particular, letting us model the fascinating and curious events that happen in our classroom.