Everyday and curriculum‐based physics concepts: When does short‐term training bring change where years of schooling have failed to do so?

Children and adults appear to believe that all parts of an object must move at the same speed. Third, sixth, and ninth graders, and even university students, exhibited this single-object/single-motion assumption in their judgements on problems involving concrete objects, computerized displays, and imagined motions. For example, they judged that in the rotational movement of a rod with a fixed pivot, a point near the centre moved at the same speed as a point near the outer end, despite the fact that the point more distant from the centre traversed a longer distance in the same amount of time. A manipulation intended to help subjects grasp the logical contradiction implied by the intuition did not lead many subjects to abandon the intuition. In contrast, an experientially based contradiction was effective. Peer group discussion involving logical and experiential argumentations also proved successful in creating cognitive change. The sources of the intuition and the conditions needed for successful training were discussed.