Research on the Diagnosis of Students’ Misconceptions and Development of Instructional Strategies: Exploring the Arrow Representation of the Free-Body Diagram from Learning and Teaching Approaches

Research on the Diagnosis of Students’ Misconceptions and Development of Instructional Strategies: Exploring the Arrow Representation of the Free-Body Diagram from Learning and Teaching Approaches Based on my researches these years on the misconceptions students hold about Newton’s third law and static equilibrium, I will proceed to explore the arrow representation of the free-body diagram from learning and teaching approaches. Findings from my past studies have shown that students have difficulties in learning mechanics such as: (1) students usually confuse the reaction force with the balance one and lack knowledge about the characteristics of the pair forces; (2) many students resolve a force into two components in an incorrect way and they draw the free-body diagram incorrectly; (3) most teachers have no idea what misconceptions their students have in learning mechanics; (4) some teachers do not use the appropriate arrow representation when teaching the free-body diagrams. The study will approach from two correlated aspects, teaching and learning, to figure out better methods about the arrow representation of the free-body diagram to improve the quality of physics textbooks, the effectiveness of physics education, and the structure of mechanics curriculum. The focus of this study is placed on (1) students’ difficulties in drawing force diagram; (2) the arrow representation of free-body diagram in statics and dynamics; (3) students’ difficulties on resolving a force into two components; and (4) multiple representations in teaching.

Project ID:PF10008-0888
External Project ID:NSC100-2511-S182-002