Teaching integrated Newton's laws of motion for high school students

Abstract

Newton's laws of motion are commonly taught separately where the first law is focused on the inertial nature of objects, the second law is focused on the relationship between object's acceleration and the net force acting on the object, and the third law is focused on the identification of action-reaction forces. In this study, we treated three of the laws as an integrative framework to explain the motion of any object and taught it in an integrated way. That is, we treated the third law as a guiding framework to identify all forces acting on an object being studied, the second law as a tool to analyze the relationship between the object's acceleration and the resultant of all forces that have been identified, and the first law is to ensure that the acceleration in the second law should be measured from an inertial frame of reference. To reduce the complexity of the frame of reference concept, we restricted to using a frame of reference that is at rest relative to the earth as the inertial frame of reference. The students learn to integrate the three of Newton's laws during the session of problem- solving practice. The students are also trained to use free-body diagrams in order to fully understand the relationship between mathematical representations they use to solve the problem and the phenomenon being studied. We have implemented the teaching strategy to 34 students of grade X in a private school in Malang. This article reports the effectiveness of this teaching strategy to improve students understanding of Newton's laws of motion.