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Children have excellent physical skills, so why is physics so hard to learn?
Many researchers propagate that children do not automatically possess the motor and physical skills they need to successfully participate in physical activities and that if children are not taught how to run, jump, throw, catch or kick which are basic elements of sports and play they will hardly develop these skills needed to participate in physical activities as adults and thus most will not get appropriate amounts of physical activity.
However, children learn these motor skills incredibly fast and seem to have a natural talent for displaying physical skills as for instance babies (as old as five days) already know how to swim. By the end of the second year of life children have already attained many kinds of crucial motor skills, from being able to walk, walk backwards, run, and jump to being able to turn objects or utilise a pencil.
Contrasting these almost inherent physical skills of a child to a child's ability to understand basic physical rules and definitions one recognises soon that physics seems to be an extraordinary difficult and hard science to grasp. Why there are so large gaps between displaying physical skills and learning physics is the aim of the brief paper.
Physical activities can be illustrated in the context of individual cognition or social processes, according to Phillips (1995), whereas knowledge is said to be actively formed with the help of mediating symbols (Rogoff, 1995). The development and change in the form that a person involves him or herself in situations that have a need for the utilisation of scientific reasoning can be regarded as a valid definition of the concept of learning in physics (van Boxtel et al. 2000). The problem with which each child, pupil or student is confronted is to understand the difference between everyday and scientific contexts of interpretation (Caravita & Hallden, 1994; Schnotz & Preub, 1997). By contrast, children, pupils and students seem to more easily understand rule systems which are related to physical activities needed for sport games and competitions.
Previous research has discovered that before entering educational institutions research has found that children already enter physics instruction with a vast amount of preformed knowledge and presupposed assumptions about the laws of physics. This preformed knowledge which is often refereed to as naïve physics or more often intuitive physics has a significant influence on the learning outcomes related to this difficult scientific subject.
There have been many studies on intuitive physics and due to the limited space only fragments of the studies can be mentioned in this brief. Studies have embraced simple investigations and listings of presupposed misconceptions and difficulties of physics (Clement, 1983; McDermott, 1984), but have also dealt with hypothesis such as that children use their own theories of physics before entering schools (McCloskey, 1983). Other studies have attempted to dissect intuitive understanding of physics knowledge into smaller constituents of understanding (diSessa, 1993). Intuitive physics studies aim at understanding how physics can be made easier to understand in schools and universities and seek to facilitate learning physics in general although the research does not include solving textbook problems.
In other words, the major goal of intuitive physics' studies is to show how learners understand the physical world before having received any kind of instruction as well as on which fragments of this qualitative naive understanding are not dismissed after instruction.
The sense-of-mechanism is what diSessa (1993) terms the pivotal basis for the naïve explanations of physical phenomena. He asked pre-schooled participants what will happen if an obstacle is place over the head of a vacuum cleaner and if it results in the vacuum cleaner increasing its pitch. The results were that most participants interpreted the situation by asserting that the vacuum machine increased its pitch because it had to work more and much harder because the obstacle hindered its optimal performance. According to diSessa and colleagues (2003) this interpretation has its roots on a certain primitive notion that includes the belief that objects and individuals have to work harder to display the normal or standard performance if there is an increased resistance through an object or individual. One can conclude with the help of such findings that pre-existent and prevalent misconceptions about the physical world make it much more difficult to learn the laws of physics since having to change conceptions and getting adapted to new ideas is much harder than to simply learning things without being preoccupied by wrong beliefs and assumptions. One of the most famous experiments investigating intuitive physics was undertaken by Kevin Dunbar (1995, 1998) who scanned the brains of pupils while all participants viewed a video demonstrating either standard Newtonian physics, where a small and a large ball fall at the same speed to the ground, or an alternative naive scenario, the small ball drops slower. Strikingly, those who had never experienced teaching in physics demonstrated significant activities in those brain areas which are related to error processing when they watched the correct Newtonian physics scenario. This suggests that physics amateurs believed to have seen something which was not correct and according to their ideas about the world. The naïve scenario, on the other hand, revealed heavy activity in brain area (medial prefrontal cortex) which is normally active when someone regards a theory as verified and right. The participants who were experts in physics demonstrated the exactly opposite behaviour. Nevertheless even they showed some minor activities in their prefrontal cortex while watching the naïve scenario which implies that this scenario appeared to be intuitively right. The conclusions one can make from these kinds of studies are very worthwhile as they include the assumption that physics should be taught earlier in order to plant in the correct ideas as soon as possible into children as relearning, refining, and retuning ideas gets harder and more difficult with age.
In order to find out why physics is so hard to learn it is also helpful to look at differences between those pupil and students who face significant difficulties with physics and those who seem to have a specific talent for learning and understanding physical equations and laws. Hammer and Elby (2003) discovered that students who have more problems with understanding physics view physics knowledge as a gathering of formulas, problem solving methods, and facts mostly disconnected from everyday experiences and reasoning. The memorisation and not a deep understanding of physical formulas is for these students also the only way to pass this subject. Those who are good at physics, in contrast, successfully view physics as a coherent system of theories and ideas and they successfully utilise the necessary symbols and equations as a means for abstractly representing and working with those ideas. Thus, true physicians regard learning as a matter of reconstructing and refining one's current understanding whereas the majority regard physical models as incongruent and incompatible with their previous knowledge and experience and find no way of linking the wrong pre-existing ideas with the more complex theories which are offered by physics.
In other words, another aspect which makes learning physics more difficult is the fact that one has to learn the proper usage of formal expressions related to physics not in terms of memorised and routine based applications but one has to comprehend fundamentally what the specific symbolic forms stand for as every single symbol is related to straightforward conceptual schemas. Hence, one could improve the learning of physics at school or university by simply tailoring the courses so that the belief that physics expertise includes a more flexible and dynamic understanding of equations is sufficiently included. Additionally in thinking of ways of how to improve the learning of concepts in physics, many scientists promote the idea that pupils should be more involved in social interaction as such an exchange of peer beliefs and understanding helps to refine and modify previously formed incorrect beliefs and hypothetical models (Lijnse, 1994). Nevertheless, it is not exactly known which speech patterns are in fact contributing to the facilitation of the learning of physics.
Another strain of argumentation states that physics is so hard to learn and so few are successful in this particular subject simply because the educational system and the design, textbooks and teachers of physics courses are inappropriate; and are thus responsible for the failure of many scholars to learn that physics is about understanding the world. As impressively demonstrated by studies in physics (e.g. Van Heuvelen, 1991a, 1991b) appropriate course alterations can increase and improve learning by at least 30% and even facilitate understanding physics up to 90% and positively effect also the necessary learning time.
However, problems commence with writing or choosing the correct textbook as writing a physics text for beginners is very demanding and difficult. The well-known scientist Breuer (1975, p.45), for instance remarked in his book Physics for Life Science Students for instance that "if the physics becomes too abstract or too far removed from topics in biology and medicine, the student may lose interest. On the other hand, if the physics becomes so diluted that its clarity and overall consistency are submerged, then the intellectual rigour has been removed then the book does not fill the student's needs. A good introductory physics course should, in sum, transmit the signal that physics is not merely a body of isolated and unrelated facts but should mediate the message that physics is a logically formed and coherent entity which delivers a unified and consistent picture of the world. Physics course are very often unsuccessful as they solely mediate fragmentations of knowledge in a way that leaves the theories unattached from any cultural, individual or scientific context. Physics, should be understood as a way of giving a meaningful unity to the phenomena of the natural and everyday world and should not be solely a set of facts (Khoon and Othman, 2004). Thus, the natural world's exploration should be in the centre light of focus and not the different abstract mathematical formula. Hence, very difficult mathematic formula with not round numbers and difficult fractions should be ideally avoided as much as possible in an introductory course. In other words solving practical problems which can be related to sport examples in order to make understanding easier should be the main focus of a physics course and not the solving of abstract conundrums (Khoon and Othman, 2004).
In sum, research on intuitive physics maintains that naive physics consists of misconceptions and wrong beliefs (e.g., force causes motion) that differ from correct models of physics (force causes acceleration) and which make it initially difficult to learn physics at school or university. Children are however excellent in physical skills as their intuitive knowledge about physical activities is congruent with what they get taught later on in life. Thus a restructuring of ideas and pre-existing knowledge is, unlike in learning physics, not necessary when learning to catch, throw or kick a ball.
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