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Secondary school pupils’ commonsense theories ofmotionJoan Bliss a , Jon Ogborn b & Denise Whitelock ba Centre for Educational Studies , King's College London (KQC)b Department of Science Education, Institute of Education , University of LondonPublished online: 25 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Joan Bliss , Jon Ogborn & Denise Whitelock (1989) Secondary school pupils’ commonsense theories ofmotion, International Journal of Science Education, 11:3, 261-272, DOI: 10.1080/0950069890110303

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950069890110303

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INT. J. Sci. EDUC., 1989, VOL. 11, NO. 3, 261-272

RESEARCH REPORTS

Secondary school pupils' commonsensetheories of motion

Joan Bliss, Centre for Educational Studies, King's College London (KQC),and Jon Ogborn and Denise Whitelock, Department of Science Education,Institute of Education, University of London

This research sets out to test a commonsense theory of motion derived from Hayes (1979) Naive PhysicsManifesto. The theory hypothesizes that our knowledge about motion is tacit, presenting the methodologywith the difficult task of eliciting such knowledge. Comics, being smaller and more amusing version of ourworld, provided excellent interview material since they provided a wide range of motion events. Thus onepisodes in four comic strips, children between the ages of 11 and 18 were asked whether and why eventsabout motion could or could not happen. Analysis of variance showed that there is no significant variationbetween subjects, nor between incidence of explanations and school year in two fundamental areas of thetheory tested, as predicted by the theory. It was further predicted that certain episodes would beinterpreted similarly by pupils and there is some evidence to show some patterns of this kind emerging.

Introduction

The last decade has seen a wide variety of research results about pupils' ideas invarious scientific concept areas such as dynamics, light, heat, electricity, etc.Researchers differ as to whether pupils' conceptions represent systematic mentalstructures or ad hoc temporary constructions. The constructivist position, whetherderived from Piaget or Kelly, is adopted by some (Driver and Ericksson 1983,Gilbert and Watts 1983, Andersson 1985); others view pupils' ideas as misconcep-tions that result from defective learning. It has proved difficult to see how toconstruct empirical tests of the relative merits of these widely different hypotheses.

The area of dynamics, because it is fundamental to physics teaching, has yielded awide range of results, revealing both that children's ideas about motion are verydifferent from those taught in school and that they are particularly resistant toteaching. McDermott (1984) reviews the area. Because of the variety of findings,some more puzzling than others, it is—as Viennot (1985) points out—difficult tomake sense of such collections of conceptions and to do more than give themevocative, possibly suggestive, names.

Ogborn (1985) proposed an outline of a commonsense theory of motion(summarized below), derived from Hayes' (1979) Naive Physics Manifesto, whichattempts a formalization of ordinary, everyday knowledge of the physical world. Thepoint of the present research is to expose this theory to empirical test. The positiontaken is that children's conceptions of motion originate through their actions on, andexperience of, the physical world very early in their development, essentiallythrough the internalization of such actions. It is supposed that these ideas persist intoadulthood, with such scientific concepts of mechanics as are met in school beingassimilated into the original schemes rather than effecting any deep modification to

0950-0693/89 $3-00 © 1989 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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them. Our research set out to do two things: to develop a methodology that wouldallow the proposed theory to be studied and tested, and to attempt to test and refinethe theory in relation to the findings. An earlier paper (Bliss and Ogborn 1988)looked at the results of a similar study with primary children; in this paper we shalldescribe the results of an interview study with secondary school children.

Outline of a commonsense theory of motion

Two basic and related terms of the theory are 'support' and 'falling'. If an object isnot supported, it falls until it is once more supported. There is an initial cause forfalling—lack of support—but one does not need to look for any further cause for thismotion to continue.

Everything needs support, except the ground that gives support but is not itselfsupported. Air and water can also support things but this is often only partial. Tosupport something needs 'strength' or 'effort' or both. If the strength of a support isnot enough, it may break or yield.

Thus a shelf supports heavy objects by being 'strong', whereas a bird supportsitself by its own effort of flying. People support things when carrying them throughtheir own strength and effort. As a support, the ground is infinitely strong and cannotbreak. The law of falling is that, having started to fall, things fall more rapidly thehigher up they start and the heavier they are.

Movement is conceptualized as taking place on the ground (or on somethingsupported by the ground), or as taking place in the air, i.e., above the ground. Todescribe motion, two more basic concepts are needed: 'place' and 'path'. One kind ofmotion consists of changing the place of something as in pushing or pullingsomething. Another kind of motion is that in which—once initiated—the object ismoving by itself, such as a football or a cricket ball. Here the path the object isfollowing is what locates it, not the place it happens to be at any particular moment.

All motions, apart from falling, require some type of effort either to change theplace or path of an object or to sustain the motion along a path. There are threepossible sources of effort:

• effort of another agent on the object• effort generated by the object• effort of the object (effort preserved within an object, once given by an agent,

which sustains its independent motion until the effort is used up)

Thus a person can pass a glass or hand a book to someone or push a pram, and thisperson supplies effort on the object. An athlete running, a bee flying, or a car movinguse effort generated by themselves in order to keep moving or to change their path or tostop. When a ball is kicked, the agent supplies effort on the object to start it going, afterwhich it rolls without help, using the effort given by the agent until this effort is used up.

Forces, including gravity, are not mentioned as such in the theory, though thegeneral term 'effort' covers some of their possible uses. It is proposed that such termsare added later to the basic natural scheme, gaining properties from the schemerather than giving properties to the scheme.

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SECONDARY PUPILS* COMMONSENSE THEORIES OF MOTION 2 6 3

Methodology

The scientific account of dynamics has evolved so as to be posed in terms that runcounter to obvious commonsense. Piaget (1937 French edition, 1955 Englishedition) described how very young children learn to see themselves as an objectamongst other objects. In early childhood, through play, imitation and exploration,children learn a great deal about how objects move, how to keep them moving, howto start or to stop them, etc. The problem with trying to develop a method toinvestigate such knowledge is that it is so fundamental and primitive that much of itremains tacit. Thus, the choice of our methodology is driven by the fact that ourtheory attempts to describe unreflective reasoning of which the subject is normallyscarcely aware.

We note that in recent research many of the situations studied have been verysimilar to or derived from school science. We felt it important to present ordinarynatural situations such that any response given by subjects would be in common-sense terms, thus avoiding situations that might suggest 'scientific' responses, orthose that children felt 'ought' to be given.

Thus the fundamental difficulty was that we would be asking subjects to makeexplicit things that are so obvious that they would normally remain unsaid. Weneeded a world that was 'normal' and 'natural' but in which the rules of the real worldcould be suspended so that it would be reasonable to ask if such rules did apply.Comics seemed to us to fit many of these requirements, since they contain a smallerand more amusing version of our world, with events ranging from the ordinary to thefunny and the fantastic. Because comics are about the 'fantastic' situated in the realworld, the contrast creates the joke.

Materials

Four classic comics, Beano, Dandy, Topper and Beezer, which pilot work showedwere still read by most younger children and had been read by many older childrenand adults, were chosen.

Stories were selected by the following criteria: a large number of movements inone story; as much diversity of movement as possible; a number of unusual orunexpected situations. After preliminary trials the comic strips chosen were: Ginger,Plug, Fred and Beryl. These strips are not reproduced in this article but copiesthereof may be obtained on request from one of the authors (F.B.).

The contents of the stories were grouped into a series of episodes, by preliminaryanalysis and in relation to the way children interviewed divided them. In all, 15episodes from the four comics were selected for the interview study, as follows:

GINGERGl Ginger imagines himself hit on head by hockey puck.G2 Coal scuttle and rubbish falling from shelf in garden shed.G3 Walking stick hanging from nail in shed.G4 Ginger swings stick and knocks colander from shelf.G5 Woman knocks Ginger over and he slides backwards downhill.G6 Ginger takes off over bump and falls, landing on ice.G7 Children throw hockey sticks and snowballs at Ginger.

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PLUGPl/2 Plug jumps out of window with umbrella. He falls and the umbrella turns insideout.P3/4 Plug lands on wheelbarrow, ejecting rubbish. The rubbish flies over the house.P5 Plug jumps from roof with parachute made from curtain.P7 Plug lands on his father.

FREDFl /2 Fred, a burglar, slides down drainpipe which breaks. He falls on to the ground.F3 Fred runs with pole as battering ram to force open locked door.F4/5 Fred tries vaulting over garden wall. The vaulting pole snaps and Fred falls onpile of pipes.

BERYLB3 Beryl heads ball which bounces, knocking over objects in room.

The sample

Twenty-nine secondary school pupils, girls and boys, from two Englich compre-hensive schools were interviewed. Complete data were obtained from 25, with onefurther child missing episodes from only one comic. The age distribution of the 26children for whom data were used was:

first and second year 5third year 5fourth year 5fifth year 5sixth form 6

Procedure

Each child was interviewed on all 15 episodes in four comics, giving data on 386accounts of episodes. The interview for each episode had two stages:

Description: subjects were asked to describe what was happening in the sequence ofpictures.

Explanation: subjects were asked: 'Do you think this could really happen, or that itcould not really happen?', and to explain why. Interviewers were careful not tosuggest what kind of explanations might be expected. In particular, ideas such as'effort' or 'support' were not introduced.

Results

Aims of the analysis

The theory makes a number of predictions about the explanations expected:

• Explanations should be interpretable in terms of support, effort, place andpath.

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• Falling should be explained in terms of lack of support, not in terms of force.Support may be partial.

• Effort will be associated with motion other than falling, and may be effort on,by or of the object.

• Effort may be used as a means of support.

and, more generally

• Explanations in these terms should persist over a wide age range.

The data were analysed to see how far children's explanations could be interpreted asbeing the same as, or similar to, those predicted by the theory.

Categories used in the analysis

A set of categories derived from theory was applied to the data in an exploratorymanner. This first perusal of the data suggested that some of the theoreticalcategories on 'effort' should be collapsed, leaving three major sub-categories and thatan impact category should be introduced. The final categories used for the analysisare as follows.

Support and falling: Children talked about the notion of 'support' in a number ofways: in terms of the strength or lack of strength of the support; in function ofwhether or not partial support could be provided (e.g., by the air in the case of aparachute) and finally in terms of the outcome (e.g., falling being due to loss ofsupport).

Effort: There were three distinct types of 'effort' mentioned by children in theirexplanations:

• Effort needed to initiate motion.• Effort needed to maintain motion or be used up in motion.• Exchange of effort.

Gravity: Gravity was mentioned either as a force that pulls things down or assomething that is used in keeping things down.

Impact: When impact was mentioned its strength depended on either the material ofwhich the object was made or the speed of the moving object.

Coding

Each pupil's interview was divided into the fifteen episodes. Each episode was thenanalysed to see whether the child explained it in terms of one or more of the abovecategories. The presence of at least one instance of any type of explanation was coded(thus repeated explanations of the same type were counted only once).

Frequency of different types of explanations

Almost all the children's explanations were able to be coded using the abovecategories. Only about 5% of the responses were school-science type explanations

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Table 1. Frequency of explanations.

Pupa

AlissaDarrenNicolaMoiraJohnPeterHowardDavinaVictoriaSaraLaraIanPaulDonnaCarolineChrisAshleyLisaClareLeeAntonyStewartKevinRoderickDenise

TOTALSPercentage

Yr

6333432256656526235452644

Fl\2

11111111111111

1111111

1

2288

Explanations

SupportEffortGravityImpactTotal:

PS

1

1

11111111111

1111

1

11976

Table

Pl\2

11

111

11

1111

1111

111

1872

Number

1261064416

292

2. Mentions

F4I5

11111111111

11

1111

1

1872

G2

11111111

111

111

1

11

1768

G4

111

1

1

1

624

/ o

4336IS6

of 'support*.

G3

11

111

1

624

G6

1

1

1

1

520

PI

1

1

1

1

1

520

Gl

1

11

1

416

G5

1

1

1

1

416

P3/4

1

1

28

Totals

8777766666655554444433332

and these appeared mainly with the older children. A notable result from the point ofview of the theory under test, is that in fact of the 292 explanations given 212 or 79%were interpretable as 'support' and 'effort'. Table 1 shows the percentages of thedifferent types of explanations. In this table explanations in terms of effort may beany one of the three kinds mentioned above.

Incidence of explanations in terms of 'support'

Table 2 shows the presence or absence of 'support' explanations for those episodeswhere there is any mention of 'support'. The theory predicts little or no relation ofexplanations to age or experience. It is therefore satisfying that analysis of variance oftable 2, while showing significant differences between episodes, shows no discrimin-

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SECONDARY PUPILS* COMMONSENSE THEORIES OF MOTION 267

ation between subjects and no relationship of incidence of explanations to year ofschooling.

Incidence of explanations in terms of 'effort'

Table 3 shows the presence or absence of 'effort' explanations for those episodeswhere there is any mention of 'effort'. As predicted, there is no significantrelationship between year of schooling and the incidence of explanations given, whilethere are significant differences between episodes. Taken together, these results for'effort' and 'support' indicate the persistence of these ideas throughout school.

Variations between episodes

Episodes vary considerably in the likelihood of attracting explanations invokingeither 'support' or 'effort'. Five episodes attracted many 'support' explanations(>50%); five (not identical) episodes attracted similarly large numbers of 'effort'explanations. For both 'support' and 'effort', there were further episodes producingsome, but few explanations (10 to 30%), and others where one or other explanationwas never invoked. Table 4 shows the nature of this patterning.

Table 3. Mentions of 'effort'.

Pupil

AntonyDavinaPaulClareAlissaSaraDonnaDeniseKevinAshleyLaraChrisVictoriaIanJohnDarrenPeterCarolineLisaRoderickLeeStewartHowardJasonNicolaMoiraTOTALSPercentage

Yr

52656654626655433234422433

22

F3

111

1

111

11111

11111

1885

P3I4

11111111111

1

1

1111

nil1

1872

G4

11111111

1

11111

1

1

11

1669

G5

111111

111

111

1

11

11462

G7

11111111

11

11

1

1

754

B3

1nil

11

11

1

nil1

329

G6

1

1

1

312

Gl

1

1

312

F4\5 G2

1 1

1

1

12

12 7-7

Totals

76665555444444444433333222

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Table 4. Frequent and infrequent use of 'support' and 'effort';-

BerylB3

FredF1/F2F3F4/F5

PlugP1/P2P3/P4P5P7

GingerGlG2G3G4GSG6G7

Support

0

+ +0

+ +

+ ++

+ ++

0+ +++++

Effort

+

0+ ++

0+ +

00

++0

+ ++ ++

+ +

Key: + H—frequent mention;+—infrequent mention;0—no mention.

It can be seen from table 4 that an episode that is very popular in the 'support'category is never popular in the 'effort' category, and vice versa. Three of the fiveepisodes with many 'support' explanations got no 'effort' explanations at all.

Discussion: patterns of explanations

Falling and support

It will be remembered that in the theory falling is explained in terms of lack of'support' and not in terms of a force or effort (unless effort is used to support).

The five episodes that elicit a substantial number of explanations about 'support'are all to do with falling:

Fl/2, F4/5: Fred falling from either the broken drainpipe or snapped vaultingpole.Pl/2, PS: Plug jumping from the roof and either falling or floating dependingon the type of parachute.G2: The rubbish and coal scuttle falling on to Ginger.

In each of these events, the explanations given were, as predicted, essentially to dowith why the person or object is not held up and not to do with gravity pulling themdown. Failure to be held up was explained in terms of either absence of 'support' orlack of strength of 'support'. The few mentions of 'effort' in F4/5 concerned thevaulter not having enough effort to go up. Those few for G2 concern the effort

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SECONDARY PUPILS* COMMONSENSE THEORIES OF MOTION 269

needed to initiate the motion of the rubbish. Otherwise, situations explained in termsof lack of support are not also explained in terms of effort (see table 4), as the theorysuggests.

The episodes in which support gets some, but less frequent mention, can also beinterpreted in terms of the theory. Support which is unproblematic, especially thatprovided by the ground, should be taken for granted and rarely mentioned. Where itis for some reason salient, one may expect support to be mentioned by some. Thus inG3 (nail holding up a stick), the strength of the support is sometimes doubted. Threeother such episodes concern falling and landing, viz., on a wheelbarrow (P3/4), on aperson (P7) and on ice (G6); all cases where there is a marked transition from lack ofsupport to being supported, and where the final support is problematic in some way.In G5—Ginger sliding downhill—the ground is a problem because it slopes. InG7—sticks and balls flying through the air—some children wonder if the air couldgive these objects any support.

It appears, then, that the theory gives a reasonable account of explanations offalling and support. In particular, falling is a motion needing no explanation otherthan absence of support.

Effort and motion

The theory holds that all motions require some type of effort to change either thepath or place of an object or to sustain a particular path of motion of a given object,with the exception of falling. There were essentially three sources of effort: effort ofthe agent on an object, effort generated by the object, and effort of the object, that is,the effort that is preserved within an object to sustain its independent motion. Tounderstand what certain episodes have in common, it is necessary to return to thethree types of explanation about effort given by the children. Table 5 shows thedistribution of these categories across the episodes.

Table 5. Mentions of 'effort' across three categories

Most popular episodesF3 (85%)P3/4 (69%)G4 (69%)G5 (62%)G7 (54%)Subtotal

Least popular episodesB3 (27%)G6 (12%)Gl (12%)F4/5 (12%)G2 (8%)SubtotalTotal

Effort toinitiate motion

0181860

42

000022

44 (42%)

Effort tosustain motion

0007

1320

63130

1333 (31%)

Exchange ofeffort

220031

26

102003

29 (27%)

Total

221818161488

73332

18106

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Effort to sustain motion or used up in motion

This category appears in at least half the episodes, most often in G7 but fairlycommonly in G5 and B3. It is the explanation expected by the theory when objectsfly freely through the air having been thrown: in G7 children are throwing hockeysticks and snowballs and in B3 Beryl heads a ball which bounces around, knockingthings over. The explanations for these two episodes do indeed focus on how mucheffort the objects have for their movement, and how they are using it up in moving.

G5 differs from the above, showing Ginger knocked over and sliding downhill.Explanations refer to the effort given initially and to the effort either kept in thesliding motion or produced by it. This episode illustrates a limitation in the accountgiven by the theory, in not explicating the relationship between falling and movingwhen going downhill, when the ground both does and does not give support.

Effort to initiate motion

Explanations about effort initiating motion occur mainly in two episodes: P3/4, andG4. In G4 an object is set moving by being hit, and in P3/4 by being thrownupwards. In both cases the pupils talk about whether the initial cause of motion willprovide the required amount of effort. It thus does seem that, as predicted, childrenidentify the possibility of effort of an agent on the object, and the causal relationshipbetween effort and motion.

Exchange of effort

The theory anticipates that people, animals and other objects with their own internalsources of effort will move things, including themselves. Examples of this kind ofthinking have appeared above. Explanations of F3 in which Fred runs with a pole tosmash a door, brought out very strongly the belief in effort generated by a person andthe possibility of passing it to an object. One pupil said: 'His force is pouring into thepole.1

Correlational evidence

Besides expecting to be able to interpret the frequency of use of explanations, afurther test of the theory would in principle be to see whether episodes whoseexplanations show some correlation have interpretable features in common. Thepresent data are too restricted in number of subjects and range of situations to go farin this direction. The restrictions make a factor analysis, which would be highlyrelevant, too dubious to rely on.

However a certain amount does emerge. Correlations between the effortresponses show similarities between G7, B3 and P3, which are seen as being unlikeG2 and F4/5. This could be interpreted as a grouping of cases where an agent's effortcauses the motion (throwing hockey sticks, heading a ball, ejecting rubbish from abarrow), contrasted with a group where motion happens without effort (coal scuttleand rubbish falling, Fred falling). This is a reasonably pleasing result.

Patterns of responses on support also have a certain amount of structure. G6 andP7 correlate positively and tend to correlate negatively with PI and P5. These looklike a group concerned with falling heavily onto a support whose strength isproblematic (Ginger landing on the ice, Plug landing on his dad), as opposed to

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SECONDARY PUPILS* COMMONSENSE THEORIES OF MOTION 271

falling but being partly supported by the air (Plug parachuting). G2 and G4 whichalso correlate are similar in that in both an object is knocked off a support and falls.Less easy to interpret is the correlation between G5 and P3/4, though both involvesomething going from being supported to not being supported.

Gravity and impact

According to the theory, gravity does not play a fundamental role in commonsensereasoning about motion. As expected, mention of the idea is not very frequent at anyage (44 such explanations in all), and is most frequent with the older pupils (36/44 bypupils in the upper half of our age range).

P5 (parachuting) was explained by children of all ages as due to the, at best,partial support offered by the air, but some older pupils invoked gravity as bringingPlug down to the ground. In G7 (balls and sticks thrown at Ginger) all pupils wereliable to think that the objects would fall when they had used up the effort of theirmotion, but older ones added that gravity would bring them down when thishappened. Similar ideas appeared in G5 (sliding downhill) and B3 (a ball bouncing).

Sixteen explanations were given in terms of'impact', for three episodes: Gl, F3and Fl/2. In all three episodes children use two notions to explain why impacts do ordo not have an effect. First, the hardness or solidity of the material of which theobject is made is important (hockey pucks aimed at Ginger, Fred's pole). Secondly,the object must be moving fast to make a big impact. In a general way these ideas areconsistent with the theory, but the theory is clearly not sufficiently explicit aboutimpacts to make much of them here.

Conclusions

There are some important limitations of the present work, seen as a test of thecommonsense theory of motion. The situations selected, while covering severalkinds of event about which the theory makes predictions, were not quite systematicenough in this respect. The age range of pupils looked at is limited (though otherwork in hand will help to remedy this), and the numbers involved were rather small.

Comics proved to be a very fruitful medium for eliciting tacit knowledge becausenot only did children enjoy the task but they also talked easily and at length aboutwhy events could or could not happen. Many children spent as long as an hour withthe interviewer.

The data point to certain areas where the theory is incomplete or too inexplicit.One is that of motion on a sloping surface, where the relation between falling andsliding or rolling downhill is unclear, and the importance or otherwise of effort is notexplained. The other is the interaction of moving objects with others, particularlyimpacts.

However, the commonsense theory of motion does appear to have survived thisencounter with children's explanations without any fundamental damage. It gave areasonably simple framework of concepts within which the data from children couldreadily be interpreted, and the greater part of the explanations they offered had directinterpretations within the theory.

In particular, the data allow one to continue regarding 'support' and 'effort' astwo essential components of commonsense reasoning about motion, with effortrequired for motions other than falling, and support having a special relation to

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falling. A view that motion other than falling is seen as needing a present cause,whilst the cause of falling lies in the past, seems to be sustainable.

It is striking that, as predicted, these explanations appeared in a way which didnot distinguish between pupils over a considerable age range. Sixth-form pupilswere as likely to use ideas of support and effort as were those in the first or secondyear. The older ones, as expected, did use other ideas, particularly gravity, but notoften and not with any fundamental change in the nature of their explanations.

We think, therefore, that the present study is sufficiently encouraging to justifyboth further development and refinement of the theory, and more extensive andcarefully planned testing.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Bob Cornish and Denise Corbett, M.Ed, students atKing's College London, for their help with this research.

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