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I will present results of a reading study that shows the usefulness
of probing physics students' cognitive processing by measuring
reading time. According to contemporary discourse theory, people
create a mental model while reading a text. If the reader encounters
conflicting information, their construction of a coherent mental
model is disrupted and reading times are prolonged. We used this
effect to study how "non-Newtonian" and "Newtonian" students create
mental models of conceptual systems in physics as they read texts
related to the idea of Newton's third law. We found significant
effects of prior knowledge state on patterns of reading time,
suggesting that students attempt to actively integrate physics texts
with their existing knowledge. Despite non-Newtonian students'
attempts to integrate the new information, there is little evidence
of a shift in their ideas after reading the text. I will discuss the
implications of this result for what we want students to learn and
how we want them to learn it.
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