arXiv subjects

Ashutosh Kumar Pathak

Publications and source records attributed to Ashutosh Kumar Pathak.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Student responses to a modified Force Concept Inventory: The Newtonian Mechanics Quiz

Even in the era of modern physics, understanding and applying Newton's classical Laws of Motion are key skills for physicists and form a core component of instructional programmes. Students arrive in the classroom with intuitive ideas about force and motion that are often misaligned with Newtonian thinking. Prior research has shown that these incorrect intuitive ideas are remarkably persistent, and can stay with students throughout their education and beyond. Reliable instruments, that can accurately evaluate student understanding of Newtonian mechanics, are required to track student progress and evaluate the efficacy of instructional programmes. The Force Concept Inventory (FCI), a conceptual quiz composed of multiple-choice questions, is a well-established instrument, developed to address these challenges. The FCI, and how students respond to its questions, has been widely investigated and discussed in the literature. Notably, research has shown that: correct responses to questions do not always correspond to correct application of Newtonian concepts; and the limited response options given for multiple-choice questions often do not capture the full range of student thinking. There is therefore a burgeoning need to develop new instruments that probe students' understanding at a deeper level, by interrogating conceptual understanding from multiple perspectives and incorporating different question formats that require students to construct and consider their responses. We introduce the Newtonian Mechanics Quiz (NMQ), a modified version of the FCI that incorporates follow-up questions in a variety of formats, each with different diagnostic functions. This article describes the development and validation of the NMQ instrument, and illustrates several novel analyses enabled by the student response dataset that can offer deep insight into students' conceptual understanding of Newton's Laws.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2026

What do student responses to the car-truck problems tell us? An investigation into two Force Concept Inventory questions

Concept inventories are widely used in Physics Education Research to uncover student misconceptions and measure the effectiveness of instruction. Two questions in the widely used multiple-choice Force Concept Inventory concern a car that is pushing a truck, as the car is accelerating and then when a steady speed has been reached. We investigate the premise that correct answering of these questions is because of good conceptual understanding of Newton's Third Law, by analyzing responses to a modified inventory that randomly offers students multiple-choice or free-text versions of the questions and follows these with questions in which students select the physical principle(s) they used. The results from 674 attempts from students at six universities show a similar pattern of results for multiple-choice and free-text versions, also comparable with Force Concept Inventory results from one of the universities in the preceding five years, but with marked differences relative to early published Force Concept Inventory data. Free-text responses and the law-selection sub-questions can reveal more about conceptual understanding than can be seen in multiple-choice responses alone. For the accelerating system (Question 15), correct responses are usually attributed to Newton's Third Law and incorrect responses are usually attributed to Newton's Second Law. When speed is constant (Question 16), around 90% of responses are correct, but a significant number of these are attributed to Newton's First Law or the Superposition Principle rather than Newton's Third Law, especially pre-instruction. We conclude that students are confusing balanced forces on a single object moving at constant speed with the correct equal-and-opposite interaction pair between two objects, and correct responses to Question 16 may be concealing an underlying misconception.

physics.ed-ph↗