Examining Student Responses for Meaningful Understanding in the Context of Wavefront Aberrometry

We present a qualitative study from group learning and teaching interviews that were conducted as part of on.-oing research to examine how students use their physics knowledge in novel situations. The data were analvzed for meaningful understanding using, techniques previously, presented by Lawson et al. and Nieswandt and Bellomo. Preliminary results indicate that students primarily utilize lower-level concepts and concept links when attempting to construct an understanding of wavefront aberrometry.