Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The central hypothesis of this paper is that physics students learn to understand equations in terms of a number of conceptual elements that are referred to as "symbolic forms." Each symbolic form associates a simple conceptual schema with a pattern of symbols in an equation. Taken together, the set of symbolic forms constitutes a vocabulary of elements out of which novel expressions can be constructed, and in terms of which expressions can be understood. The work described here is based on an extensive analysis of a corpus of videotapes of moderately advanced university students solving physics problems.