Students’ Understanding on Newton’s Third Law in Identifying the Reaction Force in Gravity Interactions
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Shaona Zhou 1, Chunbin Zhang 1, Hua Xiao 1 *
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1 South China Normal University
* Corresponding Author

Abstract

Background:
In the past three decades, previous researches showed that students had various misconceptions of Newton’s Third Law. The present study focused on students’ difficulties in identifying the third-law force pair in gravity interaction situations.

Materials and methods:
An instrument involving contexts with gravity and non-gravity associated interactions was designed and conducted among students in junior secondary school, senior high school and university.

Results:
The finding revealed that students in all grades did statistically worse in gravity interaction contexts and had general difficulties in distinguishing interaction forces and balanced forces. However, students improved their reasoning on third-law force pair with the increase of grade level irrespective of contexts. Special difficulties for junior secondary school students in understanding gravity interaction were also addressed.

Conclusions:
It is important to emphasize that the educational contexts of gravity interactions should be paid more attention to.

Keywords

License

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

https://doi.org/10.12973/eurasia.2015.1337a

EURASIA J Math Sci Tech Ed, 2015 - Volume 11 Issue 3, pp. 589-599

Publication date: 02 Apr 2015

Article Views: 1578

Article Downloads: 765

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