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Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' meaning of words used to describe motion such as speed, velocity, and acceleration. The probe is designed to reveal students' initial qualitative meaning of the word acceleration before form...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about motion using marbles and ramps. The probe is designed to reveal students' thinking about the factors that affect the time it takes for a marble to roll down a ramp....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit beginning ideas about force. The probe is designed to reveal whether students generally identify forces as pushes and pulls....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit beginning ideas about types of forces. The probe is designed to reveal whether students recognize that forces can act both in direct contact with an object and at a distance....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this probe is to examine students' ideas about an imaginary frictionless environment. The probe is designed to reveal students' ideas about the effect of friction on motion....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas related to force, energy, and motion. The probe is designed to identify students who may think about force as being carried by an object, rather than as being an interaction between ob...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this probe is to elicit students' ideas about relative motion. The probe is designed to reveal whether students use Newton's first law of motion to predict where a person would land on a moving object if he or she jumped straight up wh...
Book Chapter
This probe is designed to elicit students' ideas about changing the direction of motion in the absence of air. Many students will have seen movies or television shows in which spaceships turn by banking or using wing flaps. In outer space, where ther...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about force related to the interaction between inanimate objects. The probe is designed to determine which forces students think act on an object at rest when it is inside a fast-movin...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about Newton's first law in the context of circular motion. The probe is designed to determine whether students recognize that an object will move in a straight line unless acted on by...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about falling objects. The probe is designed to find out whether students recognize the role of mass and forces in understanding why heavy and light objects can fall at the same rate....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about forces. The probe is designed to reveal whether students recognize a situation in which the force applied by one object on another is equal, but opposite, to the force applied by...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about pairs of forces that fit Newton's third law. The probe is specifically designed to reveal whether students can identify third law force pairs as involving different objects. The ...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to identify how students interpret a motion diagram and whether they have an operational understanding of the concept of speed. The probe is designed to show whether students can interpret the intervals (i.e., ...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about circular motion and forces. The probe is designed to reveal whether students understand that turning requires a force toward the center of the curve....