The objective of this work was to highlight the conceptions of force held by students aged 10-17 years old, in situations where animate and inanimate objects interact. In the proposed experimental situations, we varied parameters such as the motion and position of an object and the agent's effort. We asked questions about both inanimate and…

Four-year-olds were reliably accurate about movement potentials for the categories of mammals, nonmammalian animals, statues of animals, wheeled vehicles, and multipart, rigid objects. The three-year-olds' scores were significantly above chance in all categories but animals. Analyses showed that children were concerned about the cause of movement…

By varying task requirements within a common procedural framework, four experiments established conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life. Overall, results suggested that even four- and five-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all "inanimate objects" are not. (Author/RH)

The purposes of this study were twofold: (1) to investigate the effect of movement for several inanimate objects on children's judgments of "aliveness;" and (2) to examine the nature of explanations given by three age groups of children in support of their judgments as to whether animate and inanimate objects were "alive" or…

Describes three experiments that examined how children (4- to 11-year-olds) use their knowledge of the attributes of living things to infer whether particular objects are alive. (HOD)

This article is the first of a two-part review of research on children's and adults understanding of gravity and on how best to teach gravity concepts to students and teachers. This first article concerns free fall--how and why objects fall when they are dropped. The review begins with a brief historical sketch of how these ideas were developed in…

This is the second and final part of a review of educational research on children's ideas about gravity. The first part concerned students' understanding of how and why things fall. This article picks up the trail of research studies that address students' understanding of the more complex ideas of projectile motion and orbits and examines how the…