Jordanian Pre-Service Physics Teacher ' s Misconceptions about Force and Motion

Abstract

The objective of this study was to investigate the physics student teachers misconceptions in force and motion concepts in Jordanian universities by using the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) test and to identify the cause of misconceptions related to these concepts. Also, the FCI has been used to detect whether misconceptions vary according to gender, the geographical place of the university in Jordan, and students’ attitudes towards physics as a major. The study was conducted on (97) student-teachers attending to the different universities in Jordan. Data were analyzed by using t-test and ANOVA test. The results of the study indicated that physics student-teachers grasp high misconceptions about the impetus and active force. 20% of the students correctly answered the questions related to Newton’s third law. In addition, the differences among the studied universities were not statistically significant in the FCI test (F = 1.311 and p = 0.247). Based on the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC), there was no correlation between the GPA of the students at high school and their performance in the FCI test, whereas a significant correlation was found between the GPA of the students at university and their performance on the test. The results also demonstrated that the performance of the students on the test did not reflect significant differences in their major attitude as well as their gender at any University in Jordan. Thus, this study could be initiated with the aim of probing the Jordanian Universities attitudes towards learning Physics and their conceptual understanding of the Newtonian force concept in Physics.