Abstract
Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is a questionnaire commonly used to assess students’ conceptual understanding of Newtonian Mechanics. We show that Cluster Analysis methods can be used to study student answers to FCI by finding their reasoning strategies on Newtonian Mechanics. Our analysis is performed to data obtained by a sample of freshman engineering students just at the beginning of their first General Physics course. The analysis takes into account the decomposition of the force concept into the conceptual dimensions suggested by test authors and successive researches. We identified groups of students with similar answering strategies, characterised by correct answers, as well as by non-correct answers showing student misconceptions/nonnormative conceptions. Such answering strategies give insights into the relationships between the student force concepts and their ability to describe and/or explain motions.
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- 1.
We included questions involving Newton’s first or second law in the same subtest. Such a view can be also pointed out from the analysis of other interview studies (Brokes and Etkina 2009).
- 2.
In this case the distance between two students, is: \( {\mathrm{d}}_{ij}=\sqrt{2\bullet \left(1-{R}_{\mathrm{bin}}\right)} \), where Rbin is the correlation coefficient. A distance dij between two students equal to zero means that they are completely similar (Rbin = 1), while a distance dij = 2 shows that the students are completely dissimilar (Rbin = −1). When the correlation between two students is 0 their distance is \( \sqrt{2} \).
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Battaglia, O.R., Fazio, C. (2021). Freshman Engineering’ Reasoning Strategies When Answering FCI Questions: A Case Study. In: Sidharth, B.G., Murillo, J.C., Michelini, M., Perea, C. (eds) Fundamental Physics and Physics Education Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52923-9_15
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