“Force,” ontology, and language

Abstract

We introduce a linguistic framework through which one can interpret systematically students' understanding of and reasoning about force and motion. Some researchers have suggested that students have robust misconceptions or alternative frameworks grounded in everyday experience. Others have pointed out the inconsistency of students' responses and presented a phenomenological explanation for what is observed, namely, knowledge in pieces. We wish to present a view that builds on and unifies aspects of this prior research. Our argument is that many students' difficulties with force and motion are primarily due to a combination of linguistic and ontological difficulties. It is possible that students are primarily engaged in trying to define and categorize the meaning of the term "force" as spoken about by physicists. We found that this process of negotiation of meaning is remarkably similar to that engaged in by physicists in history. In this paper we will describe a study of the historical record that reveals an analogous process of meaning negotiation, spanning multiple centuries. Using methods from cognitive linguistics and systemic functional grammar, we will present an analysis of the force and motion literature, focusing on prior studies with interview data. We will then discuss the implications of our findings for physics instruction.

Negative Energy: Why Interdisciplinary Physics Requires Multiple Ontologies

“…The use of these two metaphors for negative numbers is explored extensively in the mathematics education literature [14], though not in the same language we use here. The location ontology for energy is also in common usage among expert physicists, such as in the potential well metaphor [15].…”

Unpacking physics representations: Towards an appreciation of disciplinary affordance

“…This theoretical article is about the teaching and learning challenges that arise from students experiencing this partiality of representations, where important physics aspects are not initially discernible. These issues are educationally important because what creates a powerful communicative system for physics at the same time manifests in the difficulties students experience in terms of becoming "fluent" [2] (p. 28) in the disciplinary-specific representations [2,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Theoretical details from the literature, together with the concept of disciplinary affordance [11,12], are used to underpin a case that physics representations need to be "unpacked" for students.…”

Conceptual blending as a tool for analyzing group discourse

“…Mapping the students' conversation onto the conceptual blending framework helps to elucidate the dynamic and nuanced processes within the group's meaning making, advancing our understanding of how students negotiate the ontological meaning of constructs in physics [13]. Although not evident in the diagram (a static representation of a dynamic process), the idea that the photon "splits" is rejected from the blend multiple times.…”