  Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can
profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We
developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey
by expanding the Attitudes towards Problem Solving survey of Marx and Cummings
and administered it to physics graduate students. Comparison of their responses
to the survey questions about problem solving in their own graduate level
courses vs. problem solving in the introductory physics courses provides
insight into their expertise in introductory and graduate level physics. The
physics graduate students' responses to the survey questions were also compared
with those of introductory physics and astronomy students and physics faculty.
We find that, even for problem solving in introductory physics, graduate
students' responses to some survey questions are less expert-like than those of
the physics faculty. Comparison of survey responses of graduate students and
introductory students for problem solving in introductory physics suggests that
graduate students' responses are in general more expert-like than those of
introductory students. However, survey responses suggest that graduate-level
problem solving by graduate students on several measures has remarkably similar
trends to introductory-level problem solving by introductory students.
