These concepts are known to be difficult for many students. The results are dramatic, with a large fraction of the students missing all but the simplest of the five velocity graph questions after traditional instruction. This result is strikingly robust and has now been confirmed at dozens of universities and colleges. In addition to confirming the difficulty reported by other researchers, a difficulty that many instructors find surprising, they demonstrate the existence of a solution. This work is often cited as an indication that interactive-engagement MBL activities are highly effective.
Several questions remain to be addressed, however.
This study explores the first two of these three questions and touches briefly on the third. We encourage others to address the third. The study was performed in the calculus-based introductory physics class for engineering students at the University of Maryland in College Park. This is a three semester sequence where traditionally each course in the sequence has three hours of lecture from a faculty member and one hour of recitation from a teaching assistant per week. The second and third semesters have an associated two hour laboratory which is run independently.