Improving Students' Understanding of Kinematics Concepts through Multi-representational Learning

摘要

This study reports the effectiveness of multi-representational learning we developed to improve students' understanding of kinematics concepts. The participants were 58 high school students in Malang, Indonesia. The effectiveness of the learning activities was measured by the normalized gain (N-gain) of the students' scores on pretest to posttest, which used a test consisting of 20 multiple-choices items. We also concerned to find out any changes in the students' reasoning, especially dealing with using a diagram, mathematical, and vectorial representations. For this purpose, we asked the students to write their reason in responding to each multiple-choice question. We then analyzed their responses qualitatively using the constant comparative method and quantitatively using paired t-test. We found that the learning activities effectively improved the students' understanding of kinematics concepts with N-gain of 0.35. The students became fluently to determine velocity from given motion diagrams, determine the acceleration using the operational definition of acceleration, and apply vectors in kinematics.