Exploration of Students’ Misconceptions in Mechanics using the FCI

Abstract

During 3 years, we have used the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) to assess the progress of our First-Year students in Engineering in mastering the concepts of Newtonian Physics and to compare the efficiency of two teaching methods, courses and drills versus Problem-Based Learning. If both methods lead to quite similar deceptive results, the detailed analysis of the response to each question of the test allowed us to identify our students' most common misconceptions. This paper presents this research and discusses our findings.