Browsing by Author "Eryilmaz, Ali"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Applying Beliefs and Resources Frameworks To the Psychometric Analyses of an Epistemology Survey
(Amer Physical Soc, 2012) Yerdelen-Damar, Sevda; Elby, Andrew; Eryilmaz, Ali
This study explored how researchers' views about the form of students' epistemologies influence how the researchers develop and refine surveys and how they interpret survey results. After running standard statistical analyses on 505 physics students' responses to the Turkish version of the Maryland Physics Expectations-II survey, probing students' epistemologies and expectations, we interpreted the results through two different theoretical lenses, the beliefs perspective and the resources perspective. We showed that the beliefs and resources frameworks provided different interpretations of the psychometric analyses, leading to different conclusions about how the survey results should be interpreted and how the survey should be improved.
Questions About Physics: the Case of a Turkish 'ask a Scientist' Website
(Springer, 2010) Yerdelen-Damar, Sevda; Eryilmaz, Ali
The physics questions submitted to an 'ask a scientist' website were classified with respect to field of interest in physics, type of requested information in the question (factual, explanatory, etc.), and motivation for asking the question (applicative or non--applicative). In addition, differences in the number of females' and males' questions in these classifications were determined. Analysis of 995 physics questions submitted to the website indicated that modern physics questions (30.7%) were the most frequent while vibrations and wave motion questions (3.3%) were the least frequent. More than half of the questions (57.8%) were submitted to request factual information. Motivation to ask a question was inferred from the question, and was generally not related to direct and/or personal application. There were obvious differences in the number of questions asked by females and males: 84.7% of questions were asked by males while 15.3% were asked by females. However, significant gender differences were not observed in field of interest in physics, type of information requested in the question, and motivation for asking the question.