An Integrative Perspective on Students' Proportional Reasoning in High School Physics in a West African Context

This study examines students' use of proportional reasoning in high school physics problem-solving in a West African school setting. An in-depth, constructivist, and interpretive case study was carried out with six physics students from a co-educational senior secondary school in Nigeria over a period of five months. The study aimed to elicit students' meanings, claims, concerns, constructions, and interpretations of their difficulty with proportional reasoning as they worked on a series of 18 high school physics tasks. Multiple qualitative research techniques were employed to generate, analyse, and interpret data. Results indicated that several socio-cultural, psychosocial, cognitive, and mathematical issues were associated with students' use of proportional reasoning in physics. Students' capacity to reason proportionally was not only linked to their difficulty with the concept, structure, and strategies of proportional reasoning as a learning and problem-solving skill, but was also embedded in the social, cultural, cognitive, and contextual elements involved in the learning of physics. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications for teaching high school physics.