Prospective Physics Teachers' Consistency and Scientific Reasoning in the Learning of Force Concept

Physics education research has been revealed that scientific reasoning was a hidden variable which influences student's conceptual understanding in physics. A student who has good understanding is characterized by their scientific consistency and representational consistency. Hence, this study was conducted to investigate particularly the relation between the prospective physics teacher's conceptual understanding, scientific consistency, representational consistency and scientific reasoning, as well as a depiction of each variable, in the learning of force concept. Representational Variant of Force Concept Inventory (R-FCI) was used to collect consistency data and Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning was used for scientific reasoning data. The correlation between assessed variables was analized by using the Spearman rank correlation. The participant was 29 first-year prospective physics teachers who attended for introductory physics courses in 2015 at Indonesia University of Education. The findings showed that none prospective physics teacher is formal reasoner, while respectively 31% concrete reasoner, 45% early transitional reasoner and 24% late transitional reasoner. As for the scientific consistency and representational consistency, both of them can be classified as either moderately consistent or inconsistent, with none consistent. The correlation coefficient between prospective physics teacher's scientific reasoning and both consistency was 0.48 for scientific consistency and 0.39 for representational consistency, while the correlation between their scientific reasoning and conceptual understanding of the force concept was 0.49. Through this investigation we provide useful information to consider scientific reasoning which influences the student's conceptual understanding and both consistency in the learning of the force concept in the physics classroom at high or middle school.