Students mental representations in classical mechanics: three cases

Abstract

We based our study on the Mental Models Theory proposed by Johnson-Laird. College students were observed during two semesters with the objective of determining the type of mental representation that they would have used during the course, when they solved the problems and conceptual questions included in the instrutional tasks. In addition an interview was carried out at the end of the course with the purpose of finding additional elements that would allow us to infer mental models on concepts used by the students in the elaboration of their answers. The results of this research suggest the importance of the mental models in the understanding of the physical concepts. It seems that the more " elaborated " the mental models are, the more easily the students understand situations and contexts different from those worked in classroom. This paper complements another one in which we presented the categories we arrived: propositionalists, propositional modelers and imagistic modelers. Each case we describe here illustrates one of these categories.