Do Students Use and Understand Free-Body Diagrams?
By David Rosengrant, A. Heuvelen, Eugenia Etkina. 2009
165 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Physics education literature recommends using multiple representations to help students understand concepts and solve problems. However, there is little research concerning why students use the representations and whether those who use them are more successful. This study addresses these questions using free-body diagrams diagrammatic representations used in problems involving forces as a type of representation. We conducted a two-year quantitative and qualitative study of students’ use of free-body diagrams while solving physics problems. We found that when students are in a course that consistently emphasizes the use of free-body diagrams, the majority of them do use diagrams on their own to help solve exam problems even when they receive no credit for drawing the diagrams. We also found that students who draw diagrams correctly are significantly more successful in obtaining the right answer for the problem. Lastly, we interviewed students to uncover their reasons for using free-body diagrams. We found that high achieving students used the diagrams to help solve the problems and as a tool to evaluate their work while low achieving students only used representations as aids in the problem-solving process.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5067c68ce067aeabe7bf0f4913212ac0201359c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Education
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Synthesis of Discipline-Based Education Research in Physics. (2014, background): “Studies by Rosengrant, Van Heuvelen, and Etkina [95,142] found that students who drew correct free-body diagrams were much more likely to solve a problem correctly than those who drew an incorrect diagram or none at all, but those who drew an incorrect diagram performed worse than students who drew ”