Effects of Training Examples on Student Understanding of Force and Motion

Daniel White ,Andrew F Heckler

doi:10.1119/perc.2013.pr.078

Abstract

We examined the effects of simple training tasks on student responses to questions about the relationship between the directions of net force, velocity, and acceleration. Six training conditions were constructed, including a 2x2 design (abstract vs. concrete contexts) x (force-velocity training vs. acceleration-velocity training), a force-acceleration training condition, and a control (no training) condition. We found that the force-velocity and acceleration-velocity training significantly improved scores on both of these question types, but acceleration-velocity showed larger gains on the untrained question type, which is inconsistent with some interpretations of hierarchies of student understanding of force and motion found in previous works. This result implies that some students are learning the multiple relations between the variables that are typically learned in the course of standard instruction, while other students may be gaming the simple training tasks and not learning those relations between variables.

Highlights

There is a relatively long history of studies of student understanding of force and motion [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], often revealing well-known incorrect student beliefs, such as the common belief that an object experiencing a non-zero net force must have a non-zero velocity parallel to that net force and the belief that a non-zero acceleration implies a non-zero velocity
It is tempting to use these hierarchies as the basis for instructional strategies for improving student understanding, as hierarchies may suggest corresponding learning progressions, observing patterns in student responses is not sufficient to show that a particular pedagogical approach is superior
In addition to studying the effect of training different question types, we investigated whether training with abstract or concrete examples had any effect on performance, because we have found in previous studies that performance can depend on the relative abstractness of the training [9] or the target questions [10], with more concrete scenarios proving to be more difficult for students

Summary

Introduction

There is a relatively long history of studies of student understanding of force and motion [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], often revealing well-known incorrect student beliefs, such as the common belief that an object experiencing a non-zero net force must have a non-zero velocity parallel to that net force and the belief that a non-zero acceleration implies a non-zero velocity. It is tempting to use these hierarchies as the basis for instructional strategies for improving student understanding, as hierarchies may suggest corresponding learning progressions, observing patterns in student responses is not sufficient to show that a particular pedagogical approach is superior. These hierarchies do not necessarily indicate that students tend to learn a particular topic more or that understanding certain topics is a necessary prerequisite for understanding other topics. These patterns could, for example, be artifacts of existing course structure: because the relationship between acceleration and velocity is usually presented before the relationship between force and velocity, the above hierarchy is perhaps unsurprising, but this curriculum structure may not optimize student un-

Methods

Results

Conclusion