A STUDY ON LEARNERS'UNDERSTANDING OF FORCE (1) - Characteristics of mistakes they fall into easily -

Abstract

It has been said in various respects that students have a lot of difficulty in understanding "force", especially the force acting on static things, and that many students can not grasp the force shown by force vector. We have already known through our research that in the gravity vector problems there are lots of students who answer reversely, in other words they confuse the body giving force' the earth' with that given force. So first of all, in order to find out why students give wrong answers to such problems, we decided to study the types of the problems which cause wrong answers. The seventh and eighth graders of our school solved ten problems, which ask what force the force vector means. As a result, we have found that the students make more mistakes about attractive force problems than about repulsive force problems. To take another step, we analyzed the data by the quantification method of the third type, and found that the problems are classified into attractive force group and repulsive force group, and that repulsive force group is classified into magnetic force group and counter-force group. Judging from the above, we have found that attractive force vector and repulsive force vector require respectively different information processing of the students and that repulsive force vector problems are more difficult for the students.