Exploring business students’ and liberal arts students’ beliefs about physics and physics learning

The study describes the extent of change in students’ cognitive expectations after going through an Introductory Physics course. Cognitive expectations are beliefs about the learning process and the structure of knowledge. Using the Maryland Physics Expectations (MPEX) survey, the students’ responses reflected the highest level of agreement with the ‘experts response’ in the following clusters: independence, math link, reality link, and effort link. The study has shown that students could move from a novice-like view of Physics and learning Physics to a more expert-like view.