Effects of conceptual and contextual task characteristics on students’ activation of mechanics conceptions

Abstract

Abstract For promoting student learning in Newtonian mechanics, tailoring instruction to students’ conceptual needs is important. Although students’ conceptions can be inferred from research results, planning instruction is challenged by the fact that students may activate different conceptions for similar mechanics phenomena. For instance, changing the context or the wording of a task can evoke different conceptions. This article describes an approach to understanding how specific conceptual task characteristics (variations in the underlying concept or how the concept is approached) and contextual task characteristics (variations in the situation to which a concept applies) correlate with the activation of students’ conceptions in Newtonian mechanics. We employed a total of 72 single-choice tasks varying systematically conceptual and contextual task characteristics. Tasks were distributed over four test booklets and administered to a sample of undergraduates with physics as a major (N = 85) and minor subject (N = 114) as well as to high school students (age: ∼ 16, N = 157). Inferential statistical analysis was conducted to investigate if tasks with specific characteristics differed in their mean solution probabilities, revealing varying conceptions. Our findings suggest that even slight differences in how a task is situated (contextual characteristics), which law it addresses, and whether we ask for forces or for the state of motion (conceptual characteristics) result in significant differences regarding activated conceptions. For example, for Newton’s 1st law (with v = const. but ≠ 0) students activate more appropriate conceptions (higher solution probability) when tasks describe forces and ask for the resulting motion than vice versa. For planning instruction, it seems to be important to pay attention to the task characteristics used, to select them consciously, and to explicitly compare tasks that vary according to a particular characteristic.