The Use of Qualitative Representations with Ranking Task Exercises in Physics

Abstract

This study examined the use of ranking task exercises in physics as a means to elicit student's quantitative and/or qualitative understanding of four different physics concepts. Each ranking task exercise in physics asked students to examine several different scenarios that contain a number of quantitative features and then arrange the scenarios in an ordered sequence according to some other quantitative feature. In this study, students completed four different ranking task exercises as part of their coursework in their high school physics class. The responses of students to these ranking task exercises were scored, analyzed, and categorized according to the extent to which a student's response was primarily quantitative or primarily qualitative in nature. The results show that while students relied on a combination of both qualitative and quantitative representations as they completed the exercises, the majority of students used qualitative representations in their solutions to the ranking task exercises in physics. While the students' qualitative and quantitative representations supported the students' rankings of the scenarios in each ranking task exercise, the qualitative representations used by the students provided insight into the student's current understanding of the physics concepts being investigated. The findings suggest that regardless of the representation used by the student to complete the ranking task exercise, students had difficulty in correctly ranking the scenarios in all of the ranking task exercises used in this study. While the students used both quantitative and qualitative representations in their solutions to ranking task exercises in physics that contained two quantitative variables, the study found that students relied exclusively on qualitative representations in their solutions to the ranking task exercise in physics that contained four quantitative variables.