Physics and Astronomy Calendar

Mathematics is central to a professional physicist's work and, by extension, to a physics student's studies. It provides a language for abstraction, definition, computation, and connection to physical reality. This power of mathematics in physics is also the source of many of the difficulties it presents students. Simply put, many different activities could all be described as "using math in physics". Framing is a mental process that helps students navigate such a wide range of possibilities. At any given moment, the mind makes a judgment (often subconsciously) regarding the nature of the present activity. What kind of activity is this? This judgment primes a subset of the student's available resources while inhibiting others. The student's attention is focused while other possible responses are temporarily bracketed away from their conscious consideration. Localized coherencies evolve in the students' thinking. This talk will present a way of identifying and analyzing the effects of framing in upper level physics students' mathematical thinking. It uses an epistemic lens, one that looks at the type of justification the students are offering for their mathematical claims, to do so. Such a focus offers a convenient way of parsing students' thought. Several video clips are offered as examples. This framing analysis is then applied to address the sample research question "What effect does a powerful calculator like Mathematica have on physics students' thinking?"