Weight and gravity: teachers’ ambiguity and students’ confusion about the concepts

An existing dichotomy in teaching the concept of weight in junior high and high school might cause a misunderstanding of this basic physics concept and related physics phenomena. The reported results show a great deal of uncertainty as to the relationship between the concepts of weight and gravity, causing widespread confusion among high school students and preservice teachers. The results could be interpreted as support for a specific way of presenting the weight concept, hitherto employed only in a minor fraction of existing introductory physics textbooks in the USA, although it is the dominant approach practised in current textbooks in the former USSR.