Effect of Problem Solutions on Students' Reasoning Patterns on Conceptual Physics Problems

Conceptual knowledge is only one part of what students need to learn to solve problems. Knowing how to reason through a problem is also an important skill. In this paper, we study the effects of a computer-based training on students' reasoning on introductory physics problems. Participants solved three sets of conceptual problems, each of them containing three training problems with solutions followed by one near transfer problem and one far transfer problem. We analyzed students' verbal answers to elucidate the reasoning resources that they activated to construct the different explanations to the problems. We found that the students changed their reasoning when presented with solutions to training problems and later posed a transfer problem. Our results provide insights into students' activation of their resources and the procedure they used to construct their reasoning in response to the training problems.