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European Journal of Engineering

Education
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Enhancing Force Concept Inventory

diagnostics to identify dominant
misconceptions in first-year
engineering physics
a b a
Teresa Martín-Blas , Luis Seidel & Ana Serrano-Fernández
a
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Departamento de Ciencias
Básicas , EUIT Forestal, Ciudad Universitaria s/n, Madrid, 28040,
Spain
b
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Física Aplicada a la Ingeniería
Industrial. ETSI Industriales , C/José Gutiérrez Abascal, 2, Madrid,
28006, Spain
Published online: 19 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Teresa Martín-Blas , Luis Seidel & Ana Serrano-Fernández (2010)
Enhancing Force Concept Inventory diagnostics to identify dominant misconceptions in first-
year engineering physics, European Journal of Engineering Education, 35:6, 597-606, DOI:
10.1080/03043797.2010.497552

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2010.497552

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 European Journal of Engineering Education
Vol. 35, No. 6, December 2010, 597–606

Enhancing Force Concept Inventory diagnostics to identify

dominant misconceptions in first-year engineering physics
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 20:24 01 January 2015

Teresa Martín-Blasa , Luis Seidelb * and Ana Serrano-Fernándeza

a Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Departamento de Ciencias Básicas, EUIT Forestal,
Ciudad Universitaria s/n, Madrid 28040, Spain; b Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Física Aplicada a
la Ingeniería Industrial. ETSI Industriales, C/José Gutiérrez Abascal, 2, Madrid 28006, Spain

(Received 8 March 2010; final version received 26 May 2010 )

This work presents the results of a study whose aim is to detect systematic errors about the concept of
force among freshmen students. The researchers analysed the results of the Force Concept Inventory test,
which was administered to two different groups of students. The results show that, although there were
significant performance variations between the two groups, they, nonetheless, shared common incorrect
answers that were consistently triggered by the same misconceptions. The analysis proposed in this paper
could also be applied in other universities to reveal the students’ a priori mindset in Newtonian mechanics
and serve as a guideline for developing effective computer simulations or other tools.

Keywords: assessment of learning outcomes; engineering education research; evaluation; university

education

1. Introduction

It is considered common knowledge that most countries experience unimpressive physics learning
efficiencies among university students. The major general reasons given to explain this fact is that
students usually find physics both uninteresting and difficult and, as a result, they lose the interest
in the subject.
An introductory physics course syllabus typically covers the basics of Newtonian mechanics,
which will, in particular, include the laws of motion and the concept of force. One of the major
challenges posed by the study of mechanics is that the correct understanding of its laws requires a
radical change in the way of thinking. Thus, it is of capital importance to identify students’ wrong
mindset about how the physical world works in order to successfully make the transition from
metaphorical, non-systematic to Newtonian thinking.
This work proposes a way to identify systematic conceptual errors related to the concept of
force in order to develop teaching/learning tools to solve them. The long-term objective of the
project is to develop computer simulations that will contribute to solve specific conceptual errors,

*Corresponding author. Email: luis.seidel@upm.es

ISSN 0304-3797 print/ISSN 1469-5898 online

© 2010 SEFI
DOI: 10.1080/03043797.2010.497552
http://www.informaworld.com
 598 T. Martín-Blas et al.

but this work is limited to discussing the results obtained in the Force Concept Inventory (FCI)
tests and presenting a novel method to analyse them.
This paper is organised as follows. In section 2, the framework of this paper is described in
detail, as well as the motivation and tools used to implement this study. The method used in
conducting this survey is presented in section 3. Section 4 is devoted to the analysis of the results
obtained in this work. Finally, the conclusions are presented in section 5.

2. Background
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2.1. Misconceptions and common sense beliefs in mechanics

When freshmen students enrol in an introductory physics course, they already have a vague system
of beliefs about the physical world, loosely based on their empirical experience, which is often
wrong (as section 4 will show), but deeply rooted in their way of thinking. These common sense
beliefs tend to have situation-dependent meanings (Hestenes et al. 1992).
As will be shown below, one of the most persistent errors found in the student’s a priori
perception of the physical world is that there must always be a force parallel to the velocity
vector, even if the trajectory is a straight or a curved path. This misconception makes it very
difficult for them to correctly identify the forces acting, for instance, on a particle moving on an
elliptical trajectory or the movement of a charge in a uniform magnetic field. This misconception
also poses some problems when analysing the movement and the forces acting on a particle from
a non-inertial frame of reference.
These common sense misconceptions usually have a strong metaphorical basis (Hestenes et al.
1992) and are the most difficult to overcome in order to make the transition to Newtonian thinking.

2.2. The FCI

The FCI (Hestenes et al. 1992) provides a clear and detailed picture of the most common mis-
conceptions found in the beliefs that students have on the perception of force, a central concept
of Newtonian mechanics.
The FCI was originally developed to evaluate the effectiveness of introductory mechanics
instruction. The FCI is available online in many languages (http://modeling.asu.edu/RandE/
Research.html) and since 1995 comprises 30 multiple-choice questions that cover the most impor-
tant concepts of Newtonian mechanics. The questions are qualitative rather than focusing on
problem solving. This work has used the 1995 version of the FCI.
At the same time, the original authors of FCI (Hestenes 1987) (Hestenes et al. 1992) developed
a taxonomy of Newtonian concepts grouped in six dimensions. Following Savinainen and Scott
(2002a), these six dimensions are: kinematics; Newton’s First Law; Second Law; Third Law;
superposition principle; kinds of forces. In that paper (Savinainen and Scott 2002a), a thorough
description of the history and structure of FCI can be found.
The FCI can be used in a number of different ways. In most cases, the FCI test is administered
twice to the same group of students; once before instruction and then after it. Both results can
be compared using the normalised gain between them; this parameter being an indicator of the
effectiveness of the instruction process. For the Spanish case, with which the present work can be
compared, there is a review of a decade of using the FCI in Spanish Engineering Schools (Covián
and Celemín 2008) and a work comparing students from Spain and other countries (Benegas
et al. 2009).
The success of FCI surprised even its creators (Hestenes 2006) and helped to spread its use by
many physics teachers with thousands of students worldwide.
 European Journal of Engineering Education 599

The FCI can be used both in teaching and in research. There are a number of studies that address
the question of interpreting FCI scores (see, for example, Coletta and Phillips 2005, Coletta et al.
2008). Cheng et al. (2004) have used FCI to prove that online help systems enhance FCI results.
Savinainen and Viiri (2008) use the FCI to measure the conceptual coherence of students as the
validity of FCI to measure that coherence has been questioned. Their study is important for the
present work as it proves that FCI is a valid tool to evaluate concepts, both correct and wrong, in
any given group of students.
One of the most important features of FCI is that it can be used to find the common-sense
misconceptions that students have when trying to apply Newtonian mechanics ideas. A complete
taxonomy of these misconceptions can be found in the original article (Hestenes et al. 1992) and
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also in Savinainen and Scott (2002b). The present work will show how to characterise students’
results in specific FCI questions to find the universality of these misconceptions and which ones
deserve more attention.
The results obtained in this work are guiding the development of tailor-made simulations,
specifically designed for improving the student’s understanding of the laws of mechanics and the
underlying nature of the physical world depicted by them.

3. Methodology

This study was carried out in September 2009 with two groups of students, all of them in their
first year of studies. Both groups had enrolled (on a voluntary basis) in an introductory physics
course prior to the beginning of the academic year 2009/10.
Each group had just begun their studies in a different engineering school, both affiliated to
the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The first is the Industrial Engineering School (ETSII),

Figure 1. Flux diagram depicting the data collection and analysis process.
 600 T. Martín-Blas et al.

which delivers a five-year degree (equivalent to an honours degree in the UK polytechnics sys-
tem) and the second is the Forestry Engineering School (EUITF), which delivers a three-year
degree. As will be explained below, students entering each school have very different academic
profiles.
First, the group enrolling in the ETSII (110 students) were required to get a minimum pass-
ing score of 8.0 out of 10.0 prior to their admittance. This score is evaluated as the mean
value of the score obtained by students in both secondary school and a university entrance
examination.
The second group (33 students) could enter the EUITF no matter what the previous scores
in secondary school were. The first group also had a more solid scientific background, since all
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students belonging to that group had to take classes in physics in secondary school. On the other
hand, students entering the forestry school came with more heterogeneous curricular itineraries,
sometimes with a lack of basic knowledge on technical and scientific topics.
In order to assess the prior conception that both groups had about the force concept in Newtonian
mechanics, the FCI test was administered to them (in the Spanish translation) on the first day of the
training. The students were asked to answer all 30 questions of the test, trying to avoid answering
at random. They were given half an hour to complete the test.
As discussed below, the results obtained from both groups were compared, as shown in Figure 1,
in which the whole process is depicted.

4. Results and discussion

The results obtained can be analysed in different ways. On one hand, the performance of the two
groups can be compared, and n the other, more interestingly, the analysis of the incorrect answers
can give some insight about the misconceptions found in both groups, and whether these a priori
beliefs in the perception of force are the same and appear in the same proportion in both groups.

4.1. Global FCI results and comparison between groups

The first comparison is shown in Figure 2, which consists of a histogram showing the number of
correct answers obtained by both groups. In order to compare them, the frequencies have been
normalised to the number of students per group.
As shown earlier, it can be clearly seen in Figure 2 that students from the ETSII got better
scores than students from the EUITF. Darker bars representing the results obtained by the ETSII
group are displaced towards the left (more correct answers) whereas the vast majority of members
of the EUITF group got less than 16 correct answers (out of 30 questions).
Regarding the number of correct answers per question (as shown in Figure 3), the mean per-
centage of correct answers per student is 53 for the ETSII group, while this number drops to
32% among the EUITF group. If these results are compared with the ones given by Covían and
Celemín (2008) for other engineering schools in Spain, it can be seen that the ETSII group is well
over the mean, whereas the EUITF is slightly below the mean. Results given in that work vary
between 28% and 59% for the first application of the FCI.
Only questions 3 and 7 were answered correctly by more than 70% of the students in both
groups. The first was intended to find out if the students knew that the force of gravity is constant
near the Earth’s surface, whereas the second was related to the behaviour of the velocity vector
of a particle moving under the effect of a frictional force.
Finally, questions related to the law of inertia were answered reasonably well by both groups,
although two of them are discussed in more detail below.
 European Journal of Engineering Education 601
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Figure 2. Results of the Force Concept Inventory in both test groups. For each of the 30 questions, the percentage of
students that answered correctly is given.

Figure 3. Percentage of correct answers in the results of Force Concept Inventory for both test groups and for each of
the 30 questions. The mean value of the number of correct answers for both groups is also shown.

4.2. Detailed analysis of dominant incorrect answers

The second analysis required a detailed study of the kind of incorrect answers that the students
gave to the questions included in the FCI. To find out if there was a correlation between the
 602 T. Martín-Blas et al.

incorrect answers given by both groups, it was determined if there was a dominant incorrect
answer to each question and which misconception produced this answer.
An incorrect answer was considered as being dominant if it represented more than 50% of
the incorrect answers. If more than one incorrect answer to a certain question was driven by the
same misconception, then the proportion of the dominant incorrect answer to the total number of
incorrect answers was calculated by adding all the equivalent incorrect answers.
The results obtained are listed in Table 1, where questions have been classified in terms of
the misconception that triggers the dominant incorrect answer. For each question, the percentage
of the dominant incorrect answer has been normalised to the total number of incorrect answers.
These data are shown in columns 4 and 7 in Table 1, corresponding respectively to ETSII and
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EUITF. It can be seen that 24 out of the 30 questions included in the FCI test had a dominant
incorrect answer.
The misconceptions that have a dominant incorrect answer are summarised in Table 2. To see
other taxonomies of Newtonian concepts and misconceptions, see, for instance Hestenes et al.
(1992) and also Savinainen and Scott (2002a).
Figure 4 shows a plot of the percentage of the dominant incorrect answers, that is, columns 4
and 7 of Table 1 have been plotted respectively in the x and y axis. A different symbol has been
used to plot each misconception.
The first thing that catches the eye in Figure 4 is that, although students belonging to each
group have very different academic profiles, there is a remarkable correlation between the domi-
nant incorrect answers given by both of them. This fact could mean that the common sense beliefs
tend to be the same. Of course it has to be kept in mind that this is true only among the students
who chose the wrong answers. Generally speaking, as has been shown above, the percentage
of correct answers is obviously bigger for the group with a better background in physics. But
among students with a relatively poor scientific background, the errors are driven by the same
misconceptions in both groups. In that sense, the FCI has proven to be a powerful tool to discrim-
inate the a priori systematic wrong ideas about the concept of force from the random incorrect
answers.
One of the most striking misconceptions is the wrong idea that there must always be a net force
parallel to the velocity vector. It was found that the number of correct answers to the questions
related to this misconception is surprisingly low, even for the ETSII group (see first column of
Table 1). As shown before, the only situation in which most students are able to correctly describe
the movement under a net force is when a particle follows a straight path under a frictional force.
The results in Table 1 also show that the correct application of Newton’s Third Law poses some
difficulties to the students. The most persistent conceptual error is that the most massive object
or the moving object exerts the biggest force in an action–reaction pair. As shown before, this
error has an evident metaphorical basis, since it is based on the idea that the most ‘forceful’ object
exerts the biggest force.
Apart from the dominant ones, there are some incorrect answers that, though not showing a
clear pattern, could determine the mean level of the students in an introductory physics course.

4.3. Concentration analysis of incorrect answers

In order to obtain further information from the data, the concentration analysis of the FCI results,
introduced by Bao and Redish (2001), has been used. In that work, the authors introduced some
quantitative measures to assess student states in the responses to FCI.
Following Bao and Redish (2001), for every question, a concentration factor C is computed,
which takes values between 0 and 1, which is higher if answers concentrate in one of the choices.
The concentration factor depends on the score S (fraction of correct answers), so it is not a
 European Journal of Engineering Education 603

Table 1. Results of Force Concept Inventory test in both groups.

Force parallel to velocity vector

ETSII EUITF
Q Corr. (%) Dom. Inc. (%) Norm. Dom. Inc. (%) Corr. (%) Dom. Inc. (%) Norm. Dom. Inc. (%)

5 25 69 92 21 75 95
11 40 55 92 12 72 82
13 37 60 95 15 79 93
17 27 66 90 3 82 85
18 33 64 96 12 81 92
25 31 48 70 3 58 60
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26 29 58 82 3 75 77
27 77 15 65 70 27 90
Non-equal action-reaction pairs
4 45 52 95 18 79 96
15 34 55 83 27 64 88
16 65 26 74 42 48 83
28 60 27 68 30 45 64
Position/velocity/acceleration undiscriminated
19 75 11 44 27 42 58
20 60 27 68 9 63 69
Non-vectorial velocity composition
9 66 19 56 21 51 65
Ego-centred reference frame
14 73 26 96 58 36 86
Impetus/force undiscriminated
30 37 52 83 12 73 83
22 48 31 60 39 27 44
Displacement time depends on the mass
2 36 57 89 21 60 76
12 76 23 96 60 39 98
1 83 14 82 49 42 82
Constant gravity does not imply constant acceleration
3 70 22 73 79 12 57
Curved path in absence of forces
6 76 18 75 64 30 83
24 75 19 76 45 42 76

ETSII = Industrial Engineering School; EUITF = Forestry Engineering School.

Note: Questions are grouped by misconceptions and, for each question, the percentage of correct (Corr.), dominant incorrect (Dom. Inc.)
and normalised dominant incorrect (Norm. Dom. Inc.) answers is given.

Table 2. List of misconceptions that have a dominant

incorrect answer in the results of the Force Conception
Inventory for the test groups.

Misconception

Force parallel to velocity vector

Non-equal action-reaction pairs
Position/velocity/acceleration undiscriminated
Non-vectorial velocity composition
Ego-centred reference frame
Impetus/force undiscriminated
Displacement time depends on the mass
Constant gravity does not imply constant acceleration
Curved path in absence of forces
 604 T. Martín-Blas et al.
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Figure 4. Correlation plot of the normalised dominant incorrect answers between Industrial Engineering School (ETSII)
and Forestry Engineering School (EUITF) groups.

very clear measure of the role of dominant incorrect answers. A factor  is then computed
(concentration of incorrect answers), which subtracts the score from the concentration factor and
is therefore independent of S. Again,  is between 0 and 1 and  > 0.5 means that the incorrect
answers are dominantly concentrated in one choice. Details of calculations can be found in Bao
and Redish (2001).
The results of this analysis for the groups in this study are presented in Figure 5, which is
an S- plot displaying the score S for every question and the concentration factor of incorrect
answers . For many previously identified misconceptions, the related questions show a high
value of (> 0.5). The results of the same question for both groups have been linked to highlight

Figure 5. Plot of the score S and the concentration factor of incorrect answers  for the questions that have a dominant
incorrect answer. The number inside the symbol corresponds to the question number in the Force Concept Inventory.
Results for both groups in relevant questions with high  are joined with a line.
 European Journal of Engineering Education 605

that  is similar in both groups although S is very different. This is more evident for questions
4, 13, 15, 17 and 30 (which have low S) and 12, 16 and 24 (which have a higher S). The related
misconceptions can be seen in Table 1 and the discussion above.
In short, the concentration analysis provides a tool that essentially gives the same results
as those in the present study, but is less sensitive to the real meaning of different answers.
Thus, the present authors think that its results should be taken with some care. For example,
for question 5 (related to the ‘force parallel to velocity vector’ misconception), a normalised
value for the dominant incorrect answer of 92% (ETSII) and 95% (EUTIF) has been assigned
(Table 1). But concentration analysis (Figure 5) gives a  = 0.08 (ETSII) or  = 0.20 (EUITF).
The reason is that some different incorrect answers have been grouped as belonging to the same
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misconception.

5. Conclusions

This paper has presented an analysis of the performance on the FCI test by two groups of students
entering Spanish engineering schools.
First, the results have been discussed in terms of performance; percentage of correct answers
per student and percentage of correct answers per question. This analysis shows that the two
groups widely differ, but their scores are consistent with other published results.
Second, a measure has been introduced to identify the misconceptions that consistently triggered
the incorrect answers. This measure has been quantified by computing the percentage of the
dominant incorrect answers. In this way, it was possible to group the FCI questions into common
misconceptions and a valid correlation was found among the incorrect answers given by the two
groups. It has been shown that interpreting the results of FCI in terms of the normalised dominant
incorrect answers simplifies the process of identifying the more significant misconceptions in
Newtonian mechanics. The method used in the present study has also been compared with the
concentration analysis method, used in this field. The results obtained are similar for both methods.
It should be emphasised that this work shows that these results are valid not only for the test
groups in the present study, but can also be successfully applied to other students, considering that
the common sense beliefs discovered with the aid of the FCI tend to be consistent in both groups
(which are very different). Therefore, this analysis is proposed as a valid method to extract more
information from FCI results.
The results presented here show that students have only a few well-identified misconceptions.
Consequently, it is easier to design learning tools, such as computer simulations, to solve them.
Moreover, since these misconceptions tend to be the same across the two groups tested, the tools
that are designed could be used in any introductory physics course.

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About the authors

Teresa Martín-Blas is an associate professor in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, where she teaches Physics
for first-year engineering students. Her research interests include the development of kinetic-energy functionals within
the framework of the orbital-free density functional theory, Physics education research, and the use of new technologies
in Physics instruction. She has published various papers in these fields. She is the coordinator and funding member of an
Engineering Education Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which has developed online teaching
materials such as a virtual Physics course in a virtual learning environment (Moodle), an educational website, as well as
computer Physics simulations written in Flash.
Luis Seidel is an associate professor in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, where he teaches Physics for first-
year engineering students. He belongs to a Research Group in Interactive Physics, where he develops learning objects for
online Physics courses. His research interests also include the study of complex systems and the classical and quantum
chaos of molecular systems.
Ana Serrano-Fernández is an associate professor in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, where she teaches
Physics for first-year engineering students since 1996. She made her phD in crystal liquid displays at the same University.
Her research interest is at the present time based on the use of new technologies in teaching Physics. She has collaborated
in the development of some physics introductory lessons in order to provide the necessary basic concepts. She belongs to
an Engineering Education Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which has developed online teaching
materials such as a virtual Physics course in a virtual learning environment (Moodle), an educational website, as well as
computer Physics simulations (animated gifs). She has published some papers in these fields.