“On Second Thoughts…”: Changes of Mind as an Indication of Competing Knowledge Structures

Implementing targeted instructional techniques requires an understanding of the initial alternative world views students possess. These alternative world views can be measured using validated conceptual inventories combined with factor analysis methodologies. Using exploratory factor analysis and network module analysis, Scott and Schumayer and Brewe, Bruun, and Bearden identified the most prevalent and "rigid" of these world views which remained in the postinstruction student responses to the Force Concept Inventory. This paper seeks to identify the alternative world views that exist for students before and after instruction through the use of factor analysis applied to pre-and postinstruction responses from 19 727 matched, student responses. Using the distractor taxonomy proposed by Hestenes, Wells, and Swackhamer, the prevalent alternative world views of these students are characterized and analyzed. We find that the pre-instruction and postinstruction coherent alternative world views are similar, suggesting they are learned by the students prior to instruction. Using a modified version of item response curves, it was found that the active force misconception is the most rigid of the misconceptions found pre-and postinstruction, and shows minor growth in these response rates at the end of instruction. The results of this study are consistent with what experienced instructors observe when determining what physics preconceptions incoming students have. This study's agreement, combined with the results of Scott and Schumayer and Brewe, Bruun, and Bearden, strengthens the physics education research community's suggestions for improving physics instruction when using only anecdotal or qualitative evidence.

Section: Factormentioning

confidence: 84%

Exploring the preinstruction and postinstruction non-Newtonian world views as measured by the Force Concept Inventory

Eaton

Vavruska

Willoughby

2019

“…In other words these items capture force balance occurring in rectilinear motion. The correct answer to question 16 is also in this list, but as has been noted in earlier studies [7,31,32], this is to be expected as students often incorrectly employ Newton's first law to arrive at the correct answer to this question, even though the question is designed to poll their understanding of Newton's third law.…”

Section: B Factormentioning

confidence: 87%

Conceptual coherence of non-Newtonian worldviews in Force Concept Inventory data

Scott

Schumayer

2017

The Force Concept Inventory is one of the most popular and most analyzed multiple-choice concept tests used to investigate students' understanding of Newtonian mechanics. The correct answers poll a set of underlying Newtonian concepts and the coherence of these underlying concepts has been found in the data. However, this inventory was constructed after several years of research into the common preconceptions held by students and using these preconceptions as distractors in the questions. Their sole purpose is to deflect non-Newtonian candidates away from the correct answer. Alternatively, one can argue that the responses could also be treated as polling these preconceptions. In this paper we shift the emphasis of the analysis away from the correlation structure of the correct answers and look at the latent traits underlying the incorrect responses. Our analysis models the data employing exploratory factor analysis, which uses regularities in the data to suggest the existence of underlying structures in the cognitive processing of the students. This analysis allows us to determine whether the data support the claim that there are alternate non-Newtonian worldviews on which students' incorrect responses are based. The existence of such worldviews, and their coherence, could explain the resilience of non-Newtonian preconceptions and would have significant implications to the design of instruction methods. We find that there are indeed coherent alternate conceptions of the world which can be categorized using the results of the research that led to the construction of the Force Concept Inventory.

“…Although they introduced powerful distractors to reduce false positives [6], Hestenes et al found that false positives were nevertheless "fairly common" in interviews of students [1]. Several validation studies identified that question 16 (Q.16) is particularly prone to false positives [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Specifically, a number of students get the correct answer to Q.16 by incorrectly applying Newton's first law (e.g., in the case of Ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing false positives of four questions in the Force Concept Inventory

Yasuda

Mae

Hull

et al. 2018

In this study, we analyze the systematic error from false positives of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). We compare the systematic errors of question 6 (Q.6), Q.7, and Q.16, for which clearly erroneous reasoning has been found, with Q.5, for which clearly erroneous reasoning has not been found. We determine whether or not a correct response to a given FCI question is a false positive using subquestions. In addition to the 30 original questions, subquestions were introduced for Q.5, Q.6, Q.7, and Q.16. This modified version of the FCI was administered to 1145 university students in Japan from 2015 to 2017. In this paper, we discuss our finding that the systematic errors of Q.6, Q.7, and Q.16 are much larger than that of Q.5 for students with mid-level FCI scores. Furthermore, we find that, averaged over the data sample, the sum of the false positives from Q.5, Q.6, Q.7, and Q.16 is about 10% of the FCI score of a midlevel student.