Students’ attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can greatly impact their actual
problem solving practices and also influence their motivation to learn and ultimately the
development of expertise. We developed and validated an attitudes and approaches to problem solving
(AAPS) survey and administered it to students in the introductory physics courses in a typical large
research university in the US. Here, we discuss the development and validation of the survey and
analysis of the student responses to the survey questions in introductory physics courses. The
introductory physics students’ responses to the survey questions were also compared with those of
physics faculty members and physics PhD students. We find that introductory students are in general
less expert-like than the physics faculty members and PhD students. Moreover, on some AAPS survey
questions, the responses of students and faculty have unexpected trends. Those trends were
interpreted via individual…