Abstract
It is assumed that research on expertise will help to understand what the difference of experts and novices are and how novices can be transferred into experts. However, investigations about how physicists develop and apply their knowledge to both well-known and unfamiliar tasks of their domain are rarely to be found. Such analyses would help to find out what is unique in experts’ knowledge and what might differ from our expectations about how physicists act. To analyse how physicists develop and use their physics knowledge, a study with 18 German physicists has been carried out while these participants handled physics tasks on experiments. The detailed analysis of the processes occurring during the treatment of the tasks was supported by video documentation. On the background of a constructivist theory the main focus lies on the analysis of the physicists’ development of meanings, in particular special skills and ways of dealing with the tasks in the dimension of time, content, and complexity. Our findings are that the physicists solve the tasks bottom-up on astonishing low levels of complexity. They both handle the given instructions and give explanations closely to the observed phenomena step by step. Competence is shown by a broad knowledge, relating physics formulae and laws to the observed phenomena (closely combining theory and practice), judging and criticising and by systematic searches for faults.
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Roth, J., Aufschnaiter, S.V. (2003). Detailed Investigation of Professional Physicists Solving Physics Tasks. In: Psillos, D., Kariotoglou, P., Tselfes, V., Hatzikraniotis, E., Fassoulopoulos, G., Kallery, M. (eds) Science Education Research in the Knowledge-Based Society. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0165-5_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0165-5_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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