Misconceptions

Students often get confused between the slope with the height of a graph and the changes in them.  They also have difficulty relating one graph to another (position, velocity, and acceleration).  They struggle with matching narrative information with related features of a graph and the area under the graph.  They can find representing continuous motion with a line or curve and differentiating between the shape of a graph and the path of the motion to be challenging.  They also find the terms ‘negative velocity’, ‘constant acceleration’, ‘distance vs. displacement’, and ‘speed vs. velocity’ to be confusing.

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Instructional Strategies:

• Discuss position, velocity, and accelerations graphs (have them to be the same shape).  This helps students to identify differences between them and the information conveyed by each graph.

• Discuss real world physics topics and outside physics topics such as the heat transfer vs. temperature or oil consumption vs. time.  It is important to use real-world phenomena and transfer between graphs (eg., how would the graph look like given a certain object’s behavior?  how would it look like if the object changes its behavior by changes in speed, distance, direction, etc.)

• Make connections with real world events such as sports (i.e. racing)

• Challenge students by asking questions such as if the position graph is going down, is the speed going down or up?

• Say if their favourite player lost, have students reproduce the situation by changing the graph such that their favourite player would win.

• Make quick sketches of graphs in between lessons when discussing them