Effectiveness of tutorial worksheet for promoting basic vector concepts: dot product and cross product

Abstract

In recent years, several physics education researches have reported students’ understanding and difficulty of vector concepts. Lacking of understanding about dot product and cross product might cause many serious problems when the concepts are embedded in many physics topics. Therefore, we decided to design a tutorial worksheet that guides people through the development of a conceptual framework in dot product and cross product. The worksheet was implemented with 10 and 21 volunteer science teachers. Upon using the TUV items to evaluate their understanding, the results confirmed that the tutorial worksheet had facilitated their learning. The learning normalized changes were 0.82 and 0.75 considered as high learning gain. The tutorial worksheet might be used by other physics instructors who teach this material in high schools, colleges or universities.