Benchmarks for Science Literacy: Chapter 15 THE RESEARCH BASE

4 THE PHYSICAL SETTING

    4F) MOTION

Light. The majority of elementary students and some middle-school students who have not received any systematic instruction about light tend to identify light with its source (e.g., light is in the bulb) or its effects (e.g., patch of light). They do not have a notion of light as something that travels from one place to another. As a result, these students have difficulties explaining the direction and formation of shadows, and the reflection of light by objects. For example, some students simply note the similarity of shape between the object and the shadow or say that the object hides the light. Middle-school students often accept that mirrors reflect light but, at least in some situations, reject the idea that ordinary objects reflect light (Guesne, 1985; Ramadas & Driver, 1989; Shapiro, 1994). Many elementary and middle-school students do not believe that their eyes receive light when they look at an object. Students' conceptions of vision vary from the notion that light fills space ("the room is full of light") and the eye "sees" without anything linking it to the object to the idea that light illuminates surfaces that we can see by the action of our eyes on them (Guesne, 1985; Shapiro, 1994). The conception that the eye sees without anything linking it to the object persists after traditional instruction in optics (Guesne, 1985); however, some 5th-graders can understand seeing as "detecting" reflected light after specially designed instruction (Anderson & Smith, 1983).

The concept of force. Students hold various meanings for the word "force." Typically, students think force is something that makes things happen or creates change. Their descriptions of force often include related words such as energy, momentum, pressure, power, and strength. Younger students associate the word "force" with living things (Watts, 1983b).

Students tend to think of force as a property of an object ("an object has force," or "force is within an object") rather than as a relation between objects (Dykstra, Boyle, & Monarch, 1992; Osborne, 1985). In addition, students tend to distinguish between active objects and objects that support or block or otherwise act passively. Students tend to call the active actions "force" but do not consider passive actions as "forces" (Gunstone & Watts, 1985). Teaching students to integrate the concept of passive support into the broader concept of force is a challenging task even at the high-school level (Minstrell, 1989).

Newton's laws of motion. Students believe constant speed needs some cause to sustain it. In addition, students believe that the amount of motion is proportional to the amount of force; that if a body is not moving, there is no force acting on it; and that if a body is moving there is a force acting on it in the direction of the motion (Gunstone & Watts, 1985). Students also believe that objects resist acceleration from the state of rest because of friction--that is, they confound inertia with friction (Brown & Clement, 1992). Students tend to hold onto these ideas even after instruction in high-school or college physics (McDermott, 1983). Specially designed instruction does help high-school students change their ideas (Brown & Clement, 1992; Minstrell, 1989; Dykstra et al., 1992).

Research has shown less success in changing middle-school students' ideas about force and motion (Champagne, Gunstone & Klopfer, 1985). Nevertheless, some research indicates that middle-school students can start understanding the effect of constant forces to speed up, slow down, or change the direction of motion of an object. This research also suggests it is possible to change middle-school students' belief that a force always acts in the direction of motion (White & Horwitz, 1987; White, 1990).

Students have difficulty appreciating that all interactions involve equal forces acting in opposite directions on the separate, interacting bodies. Instead they believe that "active" objects (like hands) can exert forces whereas "passive" objects (like tables) cannot (Gunstone & Watts, 1985). Alternatively, students may believe that the object with more of some obvious property will exert a greater force (Minstrell, 1992). Teaching high-school students to seek consistent explanations for the "at rest" condition of an object can lead them to appreciate that both "active" and "passive" objects exert forces (Minstrell, 1982). Showing them that apparently rigid or supporting objects actually deform might also help (Clement, 1987).