Difficulties Facing Students in Transition to Newtonian Viewpoint: Newton’s Third Law Case

Abstract

Students’ alternative frameworks and prior conceptions about interactions forces and/or Newton’s motion laws have been largely investigated. The various investigations clearly show that students very often fail to apply Newton’s laws of motion in general to everyday situations and third law in particular. Using a conventional notation for representing forces on diagrams, students were presented with questions on the interaction between two objects. and asked to represent in terms of Newton’s third law the two interacting forces in a variety of situations. The results show that complete understanding of Newton’s Third Law of motion is quite rare, and that some problems related to misunderstanding which force acts on each body. The use of the terms ‘action’ and ‘reaction’ in this specific context, compared with their general use, was also found to be misleading... This study highlights some of the serious difficulties students undergo with reciprocal interaction. It suggests that we should be more anxious about the teaching/learning process and the students overall understanding of this principle and that this understanding is underpinned by an understanding of the force concept. Suggestions were proposed for promoting conceptual change based on Posner et al proposal (1982). For this purpose, we propose in our work to analyse the difficulties of high school students in learning the reciprocal interaction principle, locate and identify the obstacles to overcome when dealing with real physical situations. To achieve this task, we have elaborated a questionnaire used to locate the fields of students' difficulties and identify possible causes. We carried by means of this questionnaire a survey (paper-pencil) by requesting a samples of (102) students in different high schools through the country. The analysis and the exploitation of investigation results have shown that students encounter serious difficulties in in dealing with this law.