Abstract

The term “weight” has multiple related meanings in both scientific and everyday usage. Even among experts and in textbooks, weight is ambiguously defined as either the gravitational force on an object or operationally as the magnitude of the force an object exerts on a measuring scale. This poses both conceptual and language difficulties for learners, especially for accelerating objects where the scale reading is different from the gravitational force. But while the underlying physical constructs behind the two referents for the term weight (and their relation to each other) are well understood scientifically, it is unclear how the concept of weight should be introduced to students and how the language ambiguities should be dealt with. We investigated treatments of weight in a sample of twenty introductory college physics textbooks, analyzing and coding their content based on the definition adopted, how the distinct constructs were dealt with in various situations, terminologies used, and whether and how language issues were handled. Results indicate that language-related issues, such as different, inconsistent, or ambiguous uses of the terms weight, “apparent weight,” and “weightlessness,” were prevalent both across and within textbooks. The physics of the related constructs was not always clearly presented, particularly for accelerating bodies such as astronauts in spaceships, and the language issue was rarely addressed. Our analysis of both literature and textbooks leads us to an instructional position which focuses on the physics constructs before introducing the term weight, and which explicitly discusses the associated language issues.Received 12 September 2014DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010117This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical Society

Highlights

  • The scientific topic of weight is widely regarded as challenging to teach and difficult for students to understand in various situations, those involving acceleration

  • Disparate views are found amongst physicists about whether the term “weight” is to be used for the gravitational force on an object or for the contact force between the object and a measuring scale

  • Arising from this, we develop a conceptual framework for dealing with language issues in the teaching and learning of scientific concepts

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Summary

Introduction

The scientific topic of weight is widely regarded as challenging to teach and difficult for students to understand in various situations, those involving acceleration. Weight is conceptualized and defined in more than one way, even among physicists and across textbooks This is true even without considering everyday uses of the term and notions of the concept, including its common confusion. Science education researchers agree on the need for properly defining and explaining scientific concepts in order to improve student understanding. This is important when one considers how easy it is to misinterpret terminological confusions as misconceptions about the underlying concept [1]. Note that polysemy refers to a word having more than one related meaning, rather than having different but unconnected meanings [9] This is the root of the ongoing problem facing the term weight—it is polysemous, even in scientific usage. The problem of multiple meanings and common usages arises for other terms such as “heat,” for which the difficulties may be even greater

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