Abstract:
The aim of this study was the development of demonstration sets to
enhance Thai high-school students understanding of Newtons Laws of Motion
through Interactive Lecture Demonstration (ILD) approach. The demonstration sets
consist of two parts; (1) a simple demonstration set and (2) a complex demonstration
set. The second part applies Electromagnetism for constructing demonstration sets
which have a magnet and a solenoid as the main instruments. This set can help
students clearly observe motion due to force, activate students thinking, and attract
students interest in Newtons laws.
1Initially, from the survey of 184 tenth grade students understanding of
Newtons Laws of Motion by administering the conceptual test in which some of
questions were selected from the FMCE test (Thornton & Sokoloff, 1998), we found
that after students learned these concepts with common demonstrations, most students
still had the alternative conceptions. Many students answered that force follows
velocity. We also found that many common demonstrations could not clearly display
force in a way that allows students to understand the Newtons Laws of Motion.
After we conducted the developed demonstrations to teach students with
the ILD approach, we found that by assessing the students responses regarding
Newtons Laws of Motion in pre- and post- learning, most students in this group had a
greater understanding of Newtons laws. The average normalized gain of a class was
0.30 which implies that the developed demonstration sets can enhance students
understanding of Newtons Laws of Motion.