Pseudolongitudinal investigation on Chinese students’ categorization of kinematics and mechanics problems

Students’ categorization of physics problems reflects their expertise in problem solving. We conducted a pseudolongitudinal study to investigate the development of students’ categorization ability. Over 250 Chinese students from grade 10 to grade 12 were asked to categorize 20 problems of kinematics and mechanics into suitable categories based on the similarity of solutions. We compared the categories made by the students in different grades and found that, although students in all three grades performed as novices, their expertise in categorization gradually developed. The results also suggested that the training in problem solving may affect students’ categorization, especially for those in grade 12.

Figure 1

Q7 and Q19 in the questionnaire. The category of rotational kinematics was considered good for Q7. However, the same category was evaluated as poor for Q19 because Q19 was actually a question about projectile motion, and the information about circular motion made no contribution to solving this problem.

Figure 2

Percentage of good categories created by students in different grades. The horizontal axis is the number of questions in the good categories, and the vertical axis is the percentage of students in different grades (grade 10-blue, grade 11-orange, grade 12-gray).

Figure 3

The distribution of the number of categories created by students in different grades. The horizontal axis is the number of categories created by the students, and the vertical axis is the percentage of students in different grades (grade 10-blue, grade 11-orange, grade 12-gray).