Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,230

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Students’ preconceptions in introductory mechanics

Clement, John·1982·American Journal of Physics
DOI 10.1119/1.12989
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Data from written tests and videotaped problem-solving interviews show that many physics students have a stable, alternative view of the relationship between force and acceleration. This ’’conceptual primitive’’ is misunderstood at the qualitative level in addition to any difficulties that might occur with mathematical formulation. The misconception is highly resistant to change and is remarkably similar to one discussed by Galileo, as shown by comparison of his writings with transcripts from student interviews. The source of this qualitative misunderstanding can be traced to a deep-seated preconception that makes a full understanding of Newton’s first and second laws very difficult. In such cases learning becomes a process in which new concepts must displace or be remolded from stable concepts that the student has constructed over many years.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1119/1.12989

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Clement, J.
Venue
American Journal of Physics
Publisher
American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)
Published
1982-01-01
Volume
50
Issue
1
Pages
66-71
ISSN
  • 0002-9505 (ISSN-L)
  • 1943-2909
DOI
10.1119/1.12989
OpenAlex
W2036942355
Cited by
1,230
References
0
FWCI
138.95
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.