Do Students Know What Physicists Think About Physics?

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS)$^{1,2}$ is a 42 statement questionnaire designed to elicit student beliefs about physics. Previous results from the survey have shown that students do not agree with the attitudes of physicists and that their opinions do not change (or more often move farther away from the altitudes of physicists) after a semester of instruction. These results have raised the question of do students even know what physicists believe about how to learn physics. In this study, students were asked to choose their opinion (from a five-point Likert scale) and their opinion of what a physicist would believe. Students from three introductory physics classes (spanning engineers, pre-meds, and non-science majors) were surveyed. Results on student opinions of physicists' beliefs will be compared to their personal beliefs, and to the beliefs of physicists. 1. W.K. Adams, K.K. Perkins, N. Podolefsky, M. Dubson, N.D. Finkelstein and C.E. Wieman, ``A new instrument for measuring student beliefs about physics and learning physics: the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey'', Phys. Rev ST: Phys. Educ. Res. 2, 1, 010101 (2006). 2. See \underline {http://per.colorado.edu} for relevant papers.