Using the System Schema Representational Tool to Promote Student Understanding of Newton’s Third Law

Abstract

The Modeling Instruction program at Arizona State University has developed a representational tool, called a system schema, to help students make a first level of abstraction of an actual physical situation [1]. A system schema consists of identifying and labeling all objects of interest from a given physical situation, as well as all the different types of interactions between the objects. Given all the relevant objects and their interactions, students can explicitly identify which are part of their system and which are not, and then go on to model the interactions affecting their choice of system as either (i) mechanisms for energy transfer, or (ii) forces being exerted. In this paper, I describe the system schema tool, give examples of its use in the context of forces, and present some evidence on its effectiveness in helping students understand Newton's Third Law.

Role of mental representations in problem solving: Students’ approaches to nondirected tasks

“…The tasks are posed with a single representational format, for example, a task with a graphical format only or another one presented solely in symbolic form. In contrast, for studies concerned with multiple representations, a given task is often structured with different kinds of representations presented either sequentially [30,[32][33][34] or in parallel [31,36]. In our study, the strategies employed across the different tasks posed with a single representational format were considered together and used to infer the kinds of mental representations.…”

“…Studies were also geared towards exploring problem solving performance and hence differences in strategies with a change in representation [26][27][28]. The application of multiple representations for conceptual understanding [29,30] and enhancing problem solving performance [31,32] was additionally explored. Moreover, studies have looked into the possible factors leading to the ineffectiveness of teaching and learning based on multiple representations [27,33,34].…”

Representational task formats and problem solving strategies in kinematics and work

“…Further, the ability to present information in various representational modes, to interpret and unpack information from a given depiction, and to use this information to generate different representations are scientific skills which students need to develop [17]. Studies concerned with representational issues in problem solving have focused on investigating students' handling of graphical and diagrammatic representations [18][19][20], teaching the use of multiple representations, and exploring its effect on students' problem solving performance [21][22][23][24][25] and conceptual understanding [26][27][28][29]. Research studies have also explored students' performance with multiple representations compared to single depictions [30][31][32][33].…”

Impact of the second semester University Modeling Instruction course on students’ representation choices

“…These include some representations that we would expect to be favored by returning students, such as energy pie charts [12] and system schema [31], which were developed for and almost exclusively used in Modeling Instruction courses. However, there are also several representations including assumptions, graphs, and motion maps that we might expect to be universal (used by both lecture and Modeling Instruction course) that we see are favored by returning students.…”

“…In comparison, research on students using multiple representations is much more sparse. Rosengrant, Etkina, and Van Heuvelen provide a summary of research on multiple representations in physics education research [4], which indicates that using multiple representations improves students conceptual understanding and ability to solve problems [31,32]. Traxler et al and De Leone and Gire have shown that students in reformed physics classes or inquiry-based classes use more representations than their lecture counterparts [9,33].…”