The level of misconceptions on force and motion among physics pre services teachers in UPSI

Abstract

The research is done in order to investigate the level of misconceptions on the subtopic of Force an d Motion that exists among the Physics pre-services teachers of the Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI). Research sample are consists of 30 respondents from the final semester sciences students majoring in physics. There are 21 female respondents and nine male respondents from the Malay, Chinese and Bumiputera Sabah races. Force Concept Inventory (FCI) was used as research instrument which consist of background information of respondents and 30 questions that relates to Force and Motion with five alternative answers. Descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation and percentage and statistics inference such as t-test and one way ANOVA were used for analyzing the data collected. Research findings show a high level of misconceptions especially in the Newton’s First Law concept. Findings also show that there was no significant difference on the level of misconceptions across gender at the significant level .05. This r esearch recommends pre-services teachers of UPSI to be exposed with metacognitive strategy a s to introduce a variety of teaching skills and in the same time creates a student centred learning.