Phenomenographic approach to understanding students' learning in physics education*

Physical Review Physics Education Research Focused Collection- Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination

Physics educators and physics education researchers often face the challenge of inquiring about students’ learning difficulties understanding concepts of physics. Researchers have developed various quantitative and qualitative methodologies to address this challenge. Overtime, it has become clear that creating learning opportunities for students with different conceptual difficulties is an important task of physics educators and researchers. While each student has their own way of understanding, there are some conceptual difficulties shared among groups of students. This is where phenomenography becomes a powerful qualitative methodology for exploring the different conceptual difficulties that students have understanding physics topics. Phenomenography is an empirical approach to determining how people experience and understand aspects of their surroundings and the physical world in qualitatively different ways. Rigorous phenomenographic analysis can be used to define categories to describe general ways the students experience the research phenomenon. The phenomenographic analysis process focuses on critical aspects of the collective experience rather than the richness of individual experience. It considers that there are a limited number of categories to describe the variations of experience for a given phenomenon. The possibility of defining a limited number of categories for experiencing a phenomenon on a collective level is one characteristic that makes phenomenographic analysis particularly appropriate for research that aims to enhance teaching and learning. In this talk, we will critically examine the phenomenographic methodology in terms of the philosophical assumptions of this method, its strengths and weaknesses, and review how it has been used in physics education research over the years.