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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
For future work, it would
be interesting to compare this data with previous and future years, to see how changes in pedagogy will impact these conceptual misunderstandings and the gains observed in first-year physics courses.
53% and 20% split between correct and polarising answer, whereas in question 30, the division is 40% and 31%. While similar to the observations made for first-year students at Osaka University (Alinea and Naylor 2017), these results differ from those found
in Alinea (2020), where students favoured the polarising choice over the correct one in each of these questions. Note that for questions 13, 18 and 30, the subdominant option targets a common ‘misconception’: that motion is driven by active forces.
Question 9 is of particular interest in our study: none of the 139 students of the post-test answered this question correctly. The problem addressed in this question requires vector addition for
a struck object. It is possible that the mention of speed in the question confused this cohort, but given the limited number of respondents, further interrogation of this issue will be required in future studies.
Concluding remarks
In this article, we have discussed how technology can be used to obtain conceptual data from science and mathematics courses.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have become aware of how technology can augment teaching and learning. With the aid of online learning management systems like Blackboard, we were able to assess a large number of students with fewer logistical constraints, automate the marking of their scripts and perform basic statistical analyses -- all with greater accuracy and efficiency. Since we require large data sets to extract statistically significant results, teaching and learning practices in PER stand to benefit highly from the application of technology in the facilitation of tools such as the FCI.
Here, we examined the ‘misconceptions’ of Newtonian mechanics presented to first-year students enrolled at UJ. Our initial 2021 results, considered here (without considering gains (Hake 1998), show a clear conceptual improvement in this cohort of students (apart from one of the questions which we discussed in the previous section).
For future work, it would be interesting to compare this data with previous and future years, to see how changes in pedagogy will impact these conceptual misunderstandings and the gains observed in first year physics courses.
Acknowledgements
EC and ASC are supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF). AC is supported by a Campus France Scholarship, as well as the NRF and Department of Science and Innovation through the SA-CERN programme.