Students’ concepts of force as applied to related physical systems: A search for consistency

Recent attempts to categorize students' conceptual understanding of physical phenomena into consistent and meaningful frameworks have had limited success. We report here on an analytic technique by means of which we were able to identify what appear to be meaningful conceptual categories of students' understanding of force. However, we found only very limited support for two often‐quoted alternative frameworks, viz.: (a) if a body is moving, a net force always acts on it in the direction of the motion, and (b) no forces act on objects at rest.