Abstract

Integrating faith with academic disciplines should result in enrichment of students’ perspectives on both the discipline and their faith. This quasi-experimental pilot study examines how faith integration activities in introductory physics classes affected students’ epistemologies, defined as their beliefs about the nature of knowing and learning. The faith integration activities consisted of daily in-class discussions of characteristics of scientists, including comparisons and contrasts of typical traits of scientists with traditional Christian virtues. Changes in students’ epistemologies throughout their first semester of introductory physics were measured using the Epistemological Beliefs Assessment for the Physical Sciences (EBAPS) survey. Previous research has shown that in a typical introductory physics class, students’ epistemological beliefs become less expert-like. Comparing students who received the intervention with those that did not, students’ EBAPS scores decreased without the intervention, although the typical decreases did not occur with the intervention. The largest improvement occurred on students’ beliefs on the source of ability to learn, which was emphasized in the in-class discussions. Moreover, students in the first quartile by EBAPS pre-score showed decreases in the source of ability to learn score without intervention, but gains in the source of ability to learn axis with intervention. These results indicate that the faith integration intervention produced results of value to the discipline by preventing the typical degradation in students’ epistemologies, with the largest benefit to students at risk of not persisting in STEM because of epistemological barriers.

摘要

将信仰与学科相结合应该会丰富学生对学科和信仰的看法。这项准实验性试点研究考察了物理学入门课程中的信仰整合活动如何影响学生的认识论，即他们对认识和学习本质的信念。信仰融合活动包括每天在课堂上讨论科学家的特征，包括将科学家的典型特征与传统基督教美德进行比较和对比。使用物理科学的认识论信念评估 (EBAPS) 调查来衡量学生在物理入门第一学期认识论的变化。之前的研究表明，在典型的物理入门课中，学生的认识论信念变得不那么像专家了。将接受干预的学生与未接受干预的学生进行比较，学生的 EBAPS 分数在没有干预的情况下下降，尽管干预没有发生典型的下降。最大的进步发生在学生对学习能力来源的信念上，这一点在课堂讨论中得到了强调。此外，EBAPS预分第一个四分位数的学生在没有干预的情况下学习能力的来源得分下降，但在干预的情况下学习能力的来源有所增加。这些结果表明，信仰整合干预通过防止学生认识论的典型退化，产生了对学科有价值的结果，