Improving the Teaching of Forces: Cognitive Chunking and Chaining

Understanding forces is challenging for introductory physics students, and when they struggle, teachers often encourage them to try more practice until it “clicks.” This is problematic because it relies largely on luck and happenstance, often wasting the time, energy, and goodwill of students. Learning physics should be as efficient and reliable as possible. This requires teachers to unpack the thinking processes that experts use to think about forces and provide students with deliberate practice. This is the idea behind the pedagogical theory of cognitive apprenticeship.¹ We are training students in cognitive tasks that happen invisibly, so these tasks need to be identified, systematized, explicitly taught, and practiced under expert guidance. In this article, we will explore the forces apprenticeship of my students in a grade 11 introductory high school physics course. Our program is based on a combined Workshop Physics² and Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE)³ learning...