The influence of force misconceptions on engineering students' performance in university introductory physics courses
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55040/educa.v4i1.88Keywords:
misconception, physics, university education, academic achievement, force concept inventoryAbstract
Learning of physics becomes hard due, among other things, to the presence of misconceptions, i.e., ideas that students believe to be true but which are not scientifically correct. In this work, a reduced version of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) was used to study the most common misconceptions about force among first-year industrial engineering students at the University of Jaen. The influence of these misconceptions on the students’ performance on physics exams has been investigated. Misconceptions have a significant influence on academic failure (75 per cent of students that drop out had an inventory score, prior the teaching program, below 40 per cent). But not all misconceptions seem to have the same impact on academic results. We have analyzed in detail the eight misconceptions that are present in more than 30 % of the students and only one of them seems to be relevant to students’ performance, whereas four of them do not appear to be influential.
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