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KINEMATICS
Andreas Lichtenberger, Andreas Vaterlaus and Clemens Wagner
ETH, Department of Physics, Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract: We have developed a diagnostic test in kinematics to investigate the student
concept knowledge at the high school level. The 56 multiple-choice test items are
based on seven basic kinematics concepts we have identified. We perform an
exploratory factor analysis on a data set collected from 56 students at two Swiss high
schools addressing the following issues: What factors do the data reveal? What are the
consequences of the factor analysis on the teaching of kinematics? How can this test
be included in a kinematics course?
We show that there are two basic mathematical concepts that are crucial for the
understanding of kinematics: the concept of rate and the concept of vector (including
the direction and the addition of vectors). Furthermore the investigation of items with
different representations of motion (i.e. stroboscopic pictures, table of values and
diagrams) reveals that the students use different concepts for the different
representations. In particular, there seems to be no direct transfer between the
picture/table representation and the diagram representation.
Finally, we show how the test can be used as a diagnostic tool in a formative way
providing useful feedback for the students and for the teacher. By means of a latent
class analysis we identify four classes of students with different kinematics concepts
profiles. Such a classification may be helpful for teachers in order to prepare adjusted
learning material.
Keywords: Kinematics, Concept Knowledge, Diagnostic Test, Exploratory Factor
Analysis
INTRODUCTION
In the last two decades investigations in physics teaching at the high school and
undergraduate level have shown that a majority of science students have difficulties to
understand physics concepts (Hake, 1998; Halloun & Hestenes, 1985). Students often
attend classes with solid initial misconceptions. Conventional physics instruction
produces only little changes in their conceptual knowledge. The students may know
how to use formulas and calculate certain numerical problems but they still fail to
comprehend the physics concepts. The mentioned studies indicate that instruction can
only be effective if it takes into account the student preconceptions. The proper
concepts have to be learned but also the misconceptions have to be unlearned
(Wagner & Vaterlaus, 2011). This requires the diagnosis of student concepts and
misconceptions.
We have designed a diagnostic test with the purpose of identifying the student
concepts and misconceptions in kinematics at the high school level. The test is based
on the following list of kinematics concepts:
The list of concepts has been verified by experts and is in good agreement with the
concepts identified in other studies (e.g. Hestenes, Wells & Swackhamer, 1992).
The development of a new kinematics test has been necessary, since so far there exists
no test that allows measuring the student concept knowledge for each concept
separately. The FCI (Hestenes, Wells & Swackhamer, 1992) and the MBT (Hestenes
& Wells, 1992) are mainly used as tests to evaluate the overall dynamics concept
knowledge. They actually both contain items that correspond to the concepts
mentioned above. However, the number of these items is too small to analyze each
concept separately. The Motion Conceptual Evaluation (Thornton & Sokoloff, 1998)
and the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (Beichner, 1993) on the other
hand are rather based on task-related objectives than on concepts. The items can
therefore not clearly be linked to the concepts listed above.
We have analyzed student responses to our kinematics test addressing the following
questions: Is the test a valid instrument to determine student concept knowledge about
kinematics? Do the students answer coherently referring to the suggested concepts?
What are the consequences of the test results on teaching?
In order to treat the first two issues we carry out an exploratory factor analysis similar
to the factor analysis of the FCI data done by Scott and Schumayer (2012). Factor
analysis is a standard technique in the statistical analysis of educational data sets and
is described in detail in many pieces of literature (e.g. Merrifield, 1974, Bhner,
2011). The goal of a factor analysis is to explain the correlations among the items in
terms of only a few fundamental entities called factors or latent traits. A latent trait is
interpreted as a characteristic property of the students and made visible while
attempting to answer the items. The degree to which a student possesses a particular
trait determines the likelihood to answer a particular item correctly. Thus the items are
the manifested indicators of the latent factors. Scott and Schumayer (2012) point out
that it is important to distinguish between "factors" and "concepts". In our context the
concepts are constructs defined by experts while the factors represent the coherence of
the student thinking. The interesting issue is whether the association of items seen by
an expert agrees with the association of questions seen by students.
Referring to the third issue we suggest how the test can be applied at school in a
formative way. We show how by means of a latent class analysis different groups of
students with a similar profile of concept knowledge can be found and how a
characterization of these groups can help the teacher to prepare individual material for
every group.
The following section describes the methods including the test instrument, the
collection of data and the exploratory factor analysis. Thereafter the results of the
factor analysis are presented and interpreted. The last two sections are devoted to the
application of the instrument at school and to a final discussion of the results.
METHODS
Test Instrument
The kinematics diagnostic test is designed for high school students at level K-10. The
test items are based on the list of concepts presented in the previous section. To every
concept there is also a set of corresponding misconceptions. The misconceptions have
been verified by asking the students open questions and by analyzing their answers.
Furthermore they have been confirmed by experts.
The test consists of 56 multiple-choice items on kinematics, each item containing one
right answer and three to four distractors. Every distractor has been chosen in a way
that it can be assigned to a single misconception. This is different from the other
kinematics tests mentioned before. Thus the test not only uncovers student concepts
but also student misconceptions. The items can be furthermore divided into three
levels of abstraction:
For all levels of abstraction a representative test item is presented in the appendix.
Prior to the explorative factor analysis we empirically verified the data set. In a first
step we sorted out all items with a difficulty above 0.85 or below 0.15 because items
with such high or low difficulties do not serve as good discriminators. As a second
step we determined the internal consistency calculating Cronbach's alpha for each
concept separately. We reviewed every item that did not contribute to the internal
consistency with respect to its content. Items that were considered capable of being
misunderstood or referring to multiple concepts were dropped.
Table 1
Distribution of the items. The stars mark items that refer to two concepts. Concepts 4
and 7 are completely excluded from further analysis.
Items
Level A
Level B
Level C
Total
Concept 1
2 4 5
51 53
35 36 40 46* 47*
10
Concept 2
6 7
28 42 46* 47*
Concept 3
8 9 10
[Concept 4]
Concept 5
11 12
Concept 6
13 14
54
[Concept 7]
Total
12
[16 29 37 43]
[4]
38 39 48* 49*
44 48* 49*
[18 45]
[2]
12
27
Through the whole verification process the data set was finally reduced from 56 to 27
items. The Table 1 shows the distribution of the remaining test items according to the
concepts and levels of abstractions. The numbers indicate the item numbers in the
test. The stars mark items that refer to two concepts. As the Cronbach's alpha
coefficients for the concepts 4 and 7 are below 0.30 these concepts are excluded from
further analysis. The Cronbach's alphas for the other concepts are between 0.60 and
0.80, the mean inter-item-correlations are between 0.21 and 0.41.
Collection of data
We collected the data from 56 students from classes of two teachers at two Swiss high
schools in autumn 2012. The average age of the participants was 16 years with a
standard deviation of 1 year and a range from 14 to 18 years. 30 participants were
female, 26 were male. About half of the students were majoring in economics, the
others in science and languages. Independent of their major subject all of the students
attended a similar basic kinematics course over about six weeks. The test was
presented online at the end of the instruction. The order of items was the same for all
students. They were required to complete the survey and no item could be skipped.
The time to answer the items as well as the time to complete the test was recorded
individually. The average overall time for completing the 56 items was (46 8) min.
we decided to make the analysis step by step. We first conducted the analysis for the
data of different abstraction levels A, B and C separately. Moreover we left out the
items 46-49 which refer to two concepts. This way the number of items was reduced
to 12, 3 and 8 for level A, B and C, respectively. Afterwards we checked if the results
for the different levels were compatible. In order to check if the set of items was
applicable to an exploratory factor analysis we calculated the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkincoefficients (Cureton & DAgostino, 1983). The standard rule is that the KMOcoefficient should be at least above 0.60, for good results yet above 0.80. Our values
ranged from 0.65 to 0.77.
Figure 1. Scree Plot. The eigenvalues of the Pearson correlation matrix are depicted
in decreasing order. The knee is between the factors three and four. This suggests a
three-factor model.
seem to play only a limited role. Much more relevant for answering the items
correctly is the understanding of the mathematical concepts of rate and vector
(including direction and addition). It is therefore tempting to interpret the underlying
factors as "rate concept", "direction concept" and "vector addition concept". The three
factors are only marginally correlated meaning that we have three almost independent
factors. The fact that the correlation is the strongest between the factors 2 and 3 is in
line with our interpretation. These factors both refer to a vector concept whereas
factor 1 refers to a rate concept.
Level B items
Level B (tables of values) only contains three items. A factor analysis indicates that a
single factor may be taken as underlying student responses. The factor explains 50 %
of the variation in the data. The loadings of the items 51, 53 and 54 on the factor are
0.85, 0.69 and 0.56. We note that all the items have high loadings on the factor.
However, the loading of item 54 is the lowest. The items 51, 53 and 54 are related to
the rate concepts C1 and C5 (see Tab. 1).
Again there seems to be an underlying "rate concept" which can explain a notable part
of the correlation of the items 51, 53, 54. The fact that item 54 has a lower loading
may be due to its different content. While the items 51 and 53 are about velocity, item
54 polls student understanding of acceleration.
Level C items
Considering the scree-plot, we used a two-factor model for the data from the level C
items. The two factors account for 47 % of the variance in the data. All items can be
clearly assigned to one of the underlying factors. The factor loadings range from 0.29
to 0.96. The correlation coefficient between the factors is 0.301.
We find again that the items corresponding to the rate concepts C1 and C5 group into
one factor whereas the items linked to the direction concepts C2 and C6 group into
another one. As for solving the items with stroboscopic pictures (level A) also for
solving the diagram items (level C) there seem to be two underlying factors that may
be interpreted as a rate concept on one side and a direction concept on the other
side. Of course it is not clear if the factors found in the two different levels A and C
are actually the same. But again the understanding of the two basic mathematical
concepts of rate and direction seems to be crucial for the interpretation of diagrams in
kinematics. The correlation coefficient between the factors is again small indicating
that the two factors are mostly independent of each other.
Overall result
The interesting issue is whether the "rate factors and the direction factors found at
different abstraction levels are correlated: Are these two factors universal for solving
problems in kinematics? In order to investigate this issue we carried out a factor
analysis including all items, which loaded on these two factors at levels A, B and C.
The result of this analysis is shown in Table 2. Four factors were detected explaining
50.0 % of the total variance in the data set. It is common practice to accept loadings
above 0.3 as indicating a relevant correlation between a particular item and the
underlying factor (Kline, 1994). Therefore and for better clarity, absolute values
below 0.3 are either hidden or put in brackets, if they are important for interpretation.
The first factor groups together the items from level A and B corresponding to the rate
concepts C1 and C5. With exception of item 12, which also loads on factor 3, the
loadings are all between 0.59 and .99 meaning that these items have a high correlation
with the underlying factor. The second factor mainly groups the items from level A
and B, which refer to the direction concepts C2 and C5. However, item 7 loads on all
the factors and cannot be assigned clearly to one factor. The factors 3 and 4 group the
items of level C. Again there is a tendency that the items corresponding to the rate
concepts contribute to one factor whereas the items referring to the direction concepts
load on the other factor. The highest factor correlation is between the factors 2 and 3
with a value of 0.42. The other correlations are below 0.3.
Table 2
Factor loadings for all factor 1 and factor 2 items of the levels A-C.
Level
Item
Factor
1
Corresponding Concept
3
.78
.68
.99
11
.60
12
[.27]
51
.70
53
.71
54
.59
13
.69
14
.69
35
36
40
38
.72
39
.92
28
.30
42
.98
44
.47
[-.27]
.35
[-.21]
[.08]
[.15]
[.13]
[.18]
.33
C6: Acceleration as vector
.40
[.24]
.67
.37
[-.03]
[.28]
[-.16]
C1: Velocity as rate
[.13]
C5: Acceleration as rate
C2: Velocity as vector
C6: Acceleration as vector
The main observation is that we have different factors for level A/B and level C items.
Obviously, from the students point of view the interpretation of diagrams differs from
the interpretation of stroboscopic pictures and tables. There is no direct transfer
between these two representations of motion. Therefore instead of having two
universal rate and direction factors we have to distinguish between the levels of
abstraction or, in other words, between the different representations. Overall there
seem to be five different underlying factors that are determining the correct answering
of the items. We suggest interpreting the factors as follows:
There are some details in the results that need to be discussed. First item 12 does not
mainly load on factor 1. There is no indication that the item differs from the other
factor 1 items as regards form and content. A possible reason is the high difficulty of
.80. As discussed before high difficulties usually lead to smaller correlations, in
particular when the sample size is rather small. Also item 7 does not fit well into our
suggested 5-factor-model. Obviously the integration of the level C items into the
factor analysis slightly changes the factor axes such that the loading of item 7 on the
factor 2 is lowered. There is no obvious reason why item 7 loads on the factors linked
to the diagrams. We have to recall that the sample is actually to small for the number
of items included in the present factor analysis such that the values have to be
interpreted with caution. Finally on level C we have the items 35 and 36, which do not
only load on the rate factor anymore but also on the direction factor. This fact is
actually due to item 40. After removing that item from the analysis we discovered an
increase of the loadings of items 35 and 36 on the rate factor. This shows again that
the factor analysis is very sensitive to small changes when the number of items is big
compared to the sample size. The loadings of the items 35, 36 and 40 on both the
factors 2 and 3 are also the cause for the noted correlation between the factors 2 and 3.
There is no obvious reason for this correlation from a theoretical point of view.
At last we investigated how the items 46 49, which can be linked to both the rate
concept and the direction concept, fit into our 5-factor-model. All of these items
contain a given kinematics graph (e.g a velocity-time diagram). The student then has
to select another corresponding diagram (e.g. a position-time diagram). We integrated
the items one by one to check which factor they load on while the factor axes are not
changed too much. We found that all these items load on both the factors 3 and 4 with
values above 0.3. This is an important finding as it shows that also the answering to
items that are referring to more than one concept can be explained within our 5-factormodel. There is no indication that new factors emerge for more complex problems.
APPLICATION
We suggest integrating the present test in the basic kinematics course in a formative
way. The test provides a detailed feedback for the students as well as for the teacher.
For every student, two diagrams can be prepared, one illustrating the percentages of
items solved correctly for each of the seven concepts and the other showing which
misconceptions are still present. The teacher gets feedback about the overall
performance of the class. Furthermore by means of a latent class analysis (LCA) the
teacher can find groups of students with similar concept profiles (Collins & Lanza,
2010). This allows the teacher to prepare customized materials for the groups such
that the students can work on their individual deficits having the chance to catch up.
For better illustration we performed a LCA with help of the program MPlus (2011).
We included the data of the 27 items shown in Table 1. In order to determine the
optimal number of classes we used a technique similar to the one used for the factors.
Instead of plotting the eigenvalues, we plotted the loglikelihood against the number of
classes. By locating the knee in the graph we found four different classes that can be
assigned to four groups of students. The characteristics of the four groups are shown
in Figure 2. The mean score is defined as the group average of the fraction of
correctly solved items corresponding to the particular concept. Even if we did not
include the items referring to the concepts C4 and C7 in the LCA, we plotted the
mean scores for completeness. The four groups can be characterized as follows:
DISCUSSION
We have found that there are two basic mathematical concepts that are crucial for the
understanding of kinematics: the concept of rate and the concept of vector (including
direction and addition). The context and the content seem to play only a minor role. If
a student understands the concept of rate he is able to answer correctly to questions
about velocity and acceleration in different contexts. The same holds for the vector
concept. This result has direct implications for the instruction. It suggests that in
kinematics courses the focus should be first on the learning of the mathematical
concepts. Transferring the mathematical concepts to physical contents and applying
them in different contexts is suggested to be easier for students than learning physical
concepts without a mathematical fundament. These findings are somewhat in line
with the results of Christensen and Thompson (2012) who investigated the graphical
representations of slope and derivative among third-semester students. In the
conclusion they stated, that some of their demonstrated difficulties [in physics] seem
to have origins in the understanding of the math concepts themselves. Moreover also
Bassok and Holyoak (1989) found similar results analyzing the interdomain transfer
between isomorphic topics in physics and algebra. Students who had learned
arithmetic progressions were very likely to spontaneously recognize the application of
the algebraic methods in kinematics. In contrast, students who had learned the physics
topic first almost never exhibited any detectable transfer to the isomorphic algebra
problems. Finally, it has to be mentioned, that even if the understanding of the
mathematical concepts seems to be a requirement for understanding kinematics, it
does not guarantee success (Planinic, Ivanjek and Sussac, 2013).
Another interesting finding is that the expert associations of items corresponding to
the concepts C4 and C7 could not be found in the student answers. These items
involve the evaluation of areas under the curve. Obviously most of the student did not
have proper area concepts. Instead of that, interviews showed that students often
argued with a concept of average. For example when they were asked to interpret the
velocity-time-diagram of an object regarding to its covered distance, they often did
not consider the area under the curve but tried to estimate the mean velocity. From a
mathematical point of view, finding the mean value is equivalent to determining the
area under the curve and dividing by the interval size. Still, the interviews indicated
that the use of an average concept is accompanied by different misconceptions than
the use of the area concept. All in all the items corresponding to concept C7 were the
most difficult of the test. This can be seen in Figure 2. These results are in line with
the findings of Planinic, Ivanjek and Susac (2013). They also found that the slope
concept (which we call the rate concept) could be easily transferred from
mathematical to physical contexts. However, this is not the case for the area under the
graph concept. The transfer of this concept from mathematics to physics was found to
be much more difficult for the students. A possible reason could be the fact that
during the teaching of kinematics the interpretation of the slope is usually emphasized
much more than the interpretation of the area under the graph.
As the kinematics test used in this study contains 27 items, a minimum number of 270
students is needed to produce a reliable result by means of a factor analysis. As we do
not meet this requirement (N = 56), the present results are preliminary. Still, the fact
that the association of items given by the assignment to the concepts by experts could
be clearly found in the student answers is very promising. Furthermore most of the
results in this study confirm results from other studies. This gives rise to hope that the
results will be corroborated in a following study with a bigger sample size.
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APPENDIX
Example 1: Item 14 (Level A, concept C6: acceleration as vector)
A helicopter is approaching
for a landing. It moves
vertically downwards and
reduces its velocity.
Which of the following Which
statements
describes
acceleration
of the
of the
following the
statements
describes
thehelicopter best?
1. The acceleration is zero.
2. The acceleration points downwards.
3. The acceleration points upwards.
4. The direction of the acceleration is not defined
5. The acceleration has no direction.
Niveau:(4(
Quelle:(vgl.(Beichner(3(
Two bodies are moving on a straight line. The positions of the bodies at successive 0.2+(
second
time intervals are represented in the table below.
(
(
Time
in s
(
(
Body 1: Position in m
(
Body 2: Position in m
0.0
0.2
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.7
0.8
0.6
1.1
1.2
0.8
1.6
1.6
1.0
2.2
2.0
Quelle:(vgl.(Beichner(3(
Example
3: Item 28 (Level C, concept C2: velocity as vector)
Niveau:(4(
(
(
s"t
The following represents
a position-time graph (x-t-diagram) for an object.
x&
+(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
(
t&
1.2
2.9
2.4
1.4
3.7
2.8