Abstract:
The purposes of this study is to examine the level of conceptual understanding of
introductory physics and mathematics students have after a conventional calculus
based mechanics instruction. In addition Instructors' beliefs, conceptions Le., peda
gogical content knowledge especially the role of experiment and the role of the concept
of interaction in teaching mechanics and its influence on students' conceptual un
derstanding measured with a well known standardized multiple choice test, the Force
)
Concept Inventory (FCI) is explored. The FCI results for 121 introductory physics
and mathematics students displayed that more than half of the students participat
ing in the research were not able to apply Newton's laws to various contexts and did
not achieve the minimum level of understanding the Newtonian mechanics during a
calculus based mechanics instruction at the university. Only about to 14.9% of the
students had achieved a threshold for mastering basic concept of Newtonian mechan
ics.
