Student perspectives of and experience with sense-making: a case study

One difference between expert and novice problem-solvers is their use of sense-making strategies. Sense-making while solving physics problems involves coordinating the use of algebraic symbols with conceptual understandings, understandings of geometric relationships, and intuitions about the physical world. We have developed a new sophomore-level course that explicitly supports students in using various sense-making strategies in the context of classical mechanics and special relativity. In this paper, we examine one student whose sense-making performance improved dramatically throughout the course. We present an analysis of a series of interviews with this student, his homework, and his pre- and post-sense-making assessments. While he reports having been familiar with many of the sense-making strategies emphasized in the course, he discusses several ways his use of these strategies was enriched. We see evidence of this shift in his written coursework.