It is generally agreed that the ability to visualize functional dependencies or physical relationships as graphs is an important step in modeling and learning. However, several studies in Physics Education Research (PER) have shown that many students in fact do not master this form of representation and even have misconceptions about the meaning of graphs that impede learning physics concepts. Working with graphs in classroom settings has been shown to improve student abilities with graphs, particularly when the students can interact with them.We introduce a novel problem type in an online homework system, which requires students to construct the graphs themselves in free form, and requires no hand-grading by instructors. A study of pre/post-test data using the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) over several semesters indicates that students learn significantly more from these graph construction problems than from the usual graph interpretation problems, and that graph interpretation alone may not have any significant effect.The interpretation of graphs, as well as the representation translation between textual, mathematical, and graphical representations of physics scenarios, are frequently listed among the higher order thinking skills we wish to convey in an undergraduate course. But to what degree do we succeed? Do students indeed employ higher order thinking skills when working through graphing exercises? We investigate students working through a variety of graph problems, and, using a think-aloud protocol, aim to reconstruct the cognitive processes that the students go through. We find that to a certain degree, these problems become commoditized and do not trigger the desired higher order thinking processes; simply translating ``textbook-like'' problems into the graphical realm will not achieve any additional educational goals. Whether the students have to interpret or construct a graph makes very little difference in the methods used by the students.We will also look at the results of using graph problems in an online learning environment. We will show evidence that construction problems lead to a higher degree of difficulty and degree of discrimination than other graph problems and discuss the influence the course has on these variables.
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