Search results for "Quantitative data"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
K-means Clustering to Study How Student Reasoning Lines Can Be Modified by a Learning Activity Based on Feynman’s Unifying Approach
2017
Background:Research in Science Education has shown that often students need to learn how to identify differences and similarities between descriptive and explicative models. The development and use of explicative skills in the field of thermal science has always been a difficult objective to reach. A way to develop analogical reasoning is to use in Science Education unifying conceptual frameworks.Material and methods:A questionnaire containing six open-ended questions on thermally activated phenomena was administered to the students before instruction. A second one, similar but focused on different physical content was administered after instruction. Responses were analysed using k-means Cl…
Numerical and experimental study of liquid metal stirring by rotating permanent magnets
2018
In this work, we study liquid gallium stirring by rotating permanent magnets. We demonstrate possibility of easily creating different flow patterns by rotating permanent magnets, which can be industrially important for controlling heat and mass transfer processes in the system. Unlike the typical approach of simulating magnet rotation as a transient problem and time-averaging the Lorentz forces, we solve the magnet rotation as a harmonic (frequency domain) problem, which leads to forces equal to time-averaged ones and decreases the simulation time considerably. Numerical results are validated using qualitative flow structure results from the neutron radiography visualization of tracer parti…
Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the mental models deployed by undergraduate students in explaining thermally activated phenomena
2017
In this contribution we describe a research aimed at pointing out the quality of mental models undergraduate engineering students deploy when asked to create explanations for phenomena/processes and/or use a given model in the same context. Student responses to a specially designed written questionnaire are initially analyzed using researcher-generated categories of reasoning, based on the Physics Education Research literature on student understanding of the relevant physics content. The inferred students’ mental models about the analyzed phenomena are categorized as practical, descriptive, or explanatory, based on an analysis of student responses to the questionnaire. A qualitative analysi…
Investigating the quality of mental models deployed by undergraduate engineering students in creating explanations: The case of thermally activated p…
2013
This paper describes a method aimed at pointing out the quality of the mental models undergraduate engineering students deploy when asked to create explanations for phenomena or processes and/or use a given model in the same context. Student responses to a specially designed written questionnaire are quantitatively analyzed using researcher-generated categories of reasoning, based on the physics education research literature on student understanding of the relevant physics content. The use of statistical implicative analysis tools allows us to successfully identify clusters of students with respect to the similarity to the reasoning categories, defined as ``practical or everyday,'' ``descri…