An Analysis of Middle school Student's Responses to the Deductive Reasoning Task for Change of Concept about Force and Motion

Many students have misconceptions that upward direction force act on the object which is moving upward after being thrown vertically upward, and no force act on the object at the top of its flight because the object stop or don't' move at the top. To change these misconceptions, in this study, deductive reasoning tasks were used, and student's responses to the tasks were analyzed. In the first part of this study, student's prior conceptions about force and motion and student's deductive reasoning abilities were investigated. And the second part, student's explanations were classified to either the premise-based or idea-based explanation. In the case of the object which is moving upward, 62% of students who had misconception changed their misconceptions to physically correct concept, but, only 24% of students changed their misconceptions for the object at the top. For the first task, more students changed their misconceptions when they made responses based on premises than based on their own idea(p