Methods of physics education research were applied to find what kinds of changes in 4th, 6th, and 8th grade student understanding of motion can occur and at what age. Such findings are necessary for the physics community to effectively discharge its role in advising and assisting pre-college physics education. Prior to and after instruction the students were asked to carefully describe several demonstrated accelerated motions. Most pre-instruction descriptions were of the direction of motion only. After instruction, many more of the students gave descriptions of the motion as continuously changing. Student responses to the diagnostic and to the activity materials revealed the presence of a third “snapshot” view of motion not discussed in the literature. The 4th and 6th grade students gave similar pre-instructional descriptions of the motion, but the 4th grade students did not exhibit the same degree of change in descriptions after instruction. Our findings suggest that students as early as 6th grade can develop changes in ideas about motion needed to construct Newtonian-like ideas about force. Students’ conceptions about motion change little under traditional physics instruction from these grade levels through college level.
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We are indebted to a colleague, Robert Bauman for this designation.
Dykstra and his colleague, Wm. Smith, at Boise State University, have tried many different wordings of these instructions to get college students to make the desired motions from the written directions. We have not found a wording that gives satisfactory results. One interactive strategy dealing with the challenge has been found involving interacting with students over these specific instructions.
There is some evidence that the existence of this snapshot view of motion may contribute to other problems later in learning about physics. A colleague, Jerry Touger, has reported evidence of using this view in misinterpreting physics they are “taught” in problems they encounter involving motion through changing conditions.
We find pressing students still harder to follow directions usually has a negative effect on their thinking as it suggests there is something else they are already supposed to know. In response many students tend to quit trying to make sense and start trying just to guess at things. Not only is this response an all too frequent outcome, but many students learn powerfully inappropriate lessons about themselves and about physics, while not changing their own understanding of the phenomena.
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) formula gives the U. S. school reading level by grade of a passage. It can be computed using the formula: , where ASL is the number of words divided by the number of sentences and ASW is the number of syllables divided by the number of words. FKGL is the readability score calculated in word processing software.
