Using students’ critical aspects to deepen understanding of nuclear physics concepts

Abstract

Identifying students’ understanding provides a pathway to develop focused teaching to facilitate conceptual understanding. This study aimed to gain more insight into undergraduate students’ conceptual understanding of two nuclear physics concepts. Literature shows that students face difficulties in learning and understanding them. These concepts are nuclear binding energy (NBE) and nuclear force (NF). Phenomenography was used to provide a special qualitative research approach to exploring students’ in-depth understanding, which was not addressed in previous studies. Data were collected from purposively selected students (N = 30) through semi-structured interviews. Phenomenography was used to reveal the different ways in which students’ understand these concepts and serves as indicators of potential conceptual difficulties. Based on these, the relevant and irrelevant critical aspects discerned by students were identified using the variation theory of learning. These critical aspects illustrated how the students understood each concept. For instance, NBE is the energy that must be added to a nucleus to separate it into its constituents and relates to a relevant critical aspect. But, NBE is the energy that binds nucleons and this relates to an irrelevant critical aspect. These critical aspects can provide crucial information that can assist physics instructors in developing focused teaching and learning strategies. Thus, the responses to the interview can be used as a basis for teaching and learning nuclear physics concepts.