Chinese Journal of Science Education

Abstract

Although the ninth graders in Taiwan have only studied a few elementary concepts about force in their eighth grade, they do have several preconceptions about the concept of force at large. Furthermore, even though the concept of gravity will not be formally taught until in senior high, this does not prevent students from having some preconceptions about gravity while they are still in junior high schools. Some of these preconceptions may even impede their future learning of the concept in high school. The purpose of this study is to explore via both survey and interviews what preconceptions ninth graders may have concerning action-at-a-distance, whether force requires a medium as well as the phenomenon of gravity in general. Furthermore, this study attempts to find out for students who have not formally studied gravity, if better understanding of the concepts of action-at-a-distance and of whether force requires a medium would be related to better performance in interpreting gravitational phenomena. The sample consisted of 337 students from seven public junior highs located in Taipei City and Taipei County. Among them, fifteen students were chosen for follow-up interviews. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques were used to analyze the data. It was found that many students held various preconceptions about gravity. Many of them relied on their daily experiences and intuition as their interpretive framework for phenomena related to force and gravity. In addition, it was found that students with better understanding of the concepts of action-at-a-distance and of whether force requires a medium did demonstrate better understanding about the concept of gravity. The educational implication is that junior high physics curricula should put stronger emphasis on such foundational concepts as action-at-a-distance and whether force requires a medium so as to ease the difficulty in studying gravity in senior high schools.

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