The purpose of this study was to document the specific errors that introductory physics students make in each phase of the solution of Force and Motion problems. A mixed methods design was used to identify those errors, and it was determined that the errors which students made the most frequently were the omission of mgcosθ , mgsinθ, and the lack of a clearly defined coordinate system as part of the free-body diagram. Additionally, there was a negative statistically significant relationship between the quality of the free-body diagram and the quality of equations that were produced to describe the object’s motion. The results indicate that students do not have a full understanding of the role of a free-body diagram or its relationship to the system of equations that are generated as a result of the application of Newton’s Second Law to the free-body diagram
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-2644 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Creators | McDonald, Frank, Jr |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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