#900: Bidirectional Knowledge Cuing and the Imbalanced Epistemic Games in Physics Textbook Exercises

Integrating knowledge from multiple domains can be challenging. One example of this is physics students struggling to coordinate their mathematical and conceptual knowledge. We believe this phenomenon may be caused in part by physics students not receiving sufficient opportunities to reinforce both directions of knowledge cuing independently—from conceptual to mathematical and vice versa. In this work, we discuss how this hypothesis has implications regarding the somewhat-ambiguous mechanism for knowledge activation in the knowledge in pieces theory of conceptual change. We then report on an exploratory analysis of a calculus-based introductory physics textbook (Wolfson, 2020) to quantify the relative frequency of problem types, which would correlate to epistemic games for cuing conceptual and mathematical knowledge in opposing directions. We find that the textbook heavily favors problems with a conceptual premise and a quantitative solution, encompassing over 70% of the coded exercises.