A Study on the Teaching Methods of the Force Concept in the Junior High School Science

Abstract

It is very difficult to have the student acquire the force concept correctly in the junior high school science, although they have got much experiences about the statics phenomena in everyday life. The authors intanded ot investigate how to improve the teaching methods of the sttics in the 7th grade ranging from "the functi on" to "the balance of the two forces"・They reconstructed the curriculum which were different from those written in the todays text books at the following points. (1) The law of action and reaction of the force is learned after the balance of the two forces. (2) The Idea of the transmission of the forces was newly introduced (3) The concept of balance of the two forces was learned when the arrow (vector) representation of the force was introduced. (4) To let the student recognize conciously that any force acts between objects, the student was required to represent any force as a force acted by an object Y to an object X. The authors adopted these curriculum and teaching methods to the junior high school students and surveyed the results by tce test papers written by the authors. The data showed they were very effective to let the student understand the following basic concepts of the force. (1) The force acts between two objects. (2) The force is interactive. (3) There is a distinct difference between the balance of the two forces and the action-reaction of the force.