An Investigation Of Students' Problem Solving Skills In An Introductory Physics Class

The purpose of this study was to document the specific errors that introductory physics students make in each phase of the solution of Force and Motion problems. A mixed methods design was used to identify those errors, and it was determined that the errors which students made the most frequently were the omission of mgcosθ , mgsinθ, and the lack of a clearly defined coordinate system as part of the free-body diagram. Additionally, there was a negative statistically significant relationship between the quality of the free-body diagram and the quality of equations that were produced to describe the object’s motion. The results indicate that students do not have a full understanding of the role of a free-body diagram or its relationship to the system of equations that are generated as a result of the application of Newton’s Second Law to the free-body diagram

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