Representation use and strategy choice in physics problem solving

In this paper, we examine student success on three variants of a test item given in different representational formats (verbal, pictorial, and graphical), with an isomorphic problem statement. We confirm results from recent papers where it is mentioned that physics students' problem-solving competence can vary with representational format and that solutions can be triggered by particular details of the representation. Previous studies are complemented with a fine grained analysis of solution strategies. We find that students use different problem-solving strategies, depending on the representational format in which the problem is stated.