Effect of instructional environment on physics students’ representational skills

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17. Note that the students in the reformed 202 section were largely those from the reformed 201 section. The students in the traditional 202 course had, for the most part, taken a traditional 201 course as well. Thus, when we compare the two 202 sections, we should be aware that any significant differences may be the cumulative result of two semesters of instruction, not one.
18. One potential weakness in our data stems from the fact that if student absolute performance is too low, relative performances will necessarily be very even regardless of student representational skill. However, only one of the four reform course quizzes [two in 202 presented here and two in 201 (Ref. [11])] shows very low absolute numbers, and these are not present if one considers the likely student misinterpretation described above. Thus, we are confident that the lack of choice/control splits in the reform courses is a genuine effect.
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20. We chose one-minute intervals as that seemed a reasonable order of magnitude for discrete portions of a discussion or explanation. Intervals on the order of several seconds result in all intervals containing single representations. Intervals of several minutes tend to include all or nearly all possible representations. As a check, we repeated the analysis with two-minute intervals. The figures for multiple representational use were modestly increased, the other categories increased less, and the relative class-to-class variations (which are of the most interest here) were essentially unchanged.
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