Examining the Relationships Among Intuition, Reasoning, and Conceptual Understanding in Physics

It is a common expectation that, after instruction, students will consciously and systematically construct chains of reasoning that start from established scientific principles and lead to well-justified predictions. When student performance on course exams does not reveal such patterns, it is often assumed that students either do not possess a suitable understanding of the relevant physics or are unable to construct such inferential reasoning chains due to deficiencies in reasoning abilities. Psychological research on thinking and reasoning, however, seems to suggest that, in many cases, thinking processes follow paths that are strikingly different from those outlined above. A set of theoretical ideas, referred to broadly as dual process theory, asserts that human cognition relies on two largely independent thinking systems. The first of these systems is fast and intuitive, while the second is slow, logically deliberate, and effortful. In an ongoing project focusing on student reasoning in physics, we have been developing and applying various methodologies that allow us to disentangle reasoning, intuition, and conceptual understanding in physics. We then use the dual process theory to account for the observed patterns in student responses. Data from introductory physics courses are presented and implications for instruction are discussed.