The Impact of Context on Students’ Framing and Reasoning about Fluid Dynamics

Contextual features of assessments can influence the ideas students draw from and the ways they assemble knowledge. We used a mixed-methods approach to explore how surface-level item context impacts student reasoning. In study 1, we developed an isomorphic survey to capture student reasoning about fluid dynamics, a crosscutting phenomenon, in two item contexts (blood vessels, water pipes), and administered the survey to students in two different course contexts: human anatomy and physiology (HA&P) and physics. We observed a significant difference in two of 16 between-context comparisons and a significant difference in how HA&P students responded to our survey compared with physics students. In study 2, we conducted interviews with HA&P students to explore our findings from study 1. Using the resources and framing theoretical framework, we found that HA&P students responding to the blood vessel protocol used teleological cognitive resources more frequently compared with HA&P students responding to the water pipes version. Further, students reasoning about water pipes spontaneously introduced HA&P content. Our findings support a dynamic model of cognition and align with previous work suggesting item context impacts student reasoning. These results also underscore a need for instructors to recognize the impact of context on student reasoning about crosscutting phenomena.