Two patterns of student reasoning in problem solving concerning frictional force

Although students experience friction in their everyday life, they have difficulty understanding the scientific concept of friction. To solve this problem, various instructional suggestions have been made by researchers concerning the teaching of friction. In this study, we conducted a survey to investigate science high school students' reasoning patterns concerning frictional force problems to solve students' difficulty from an unconventional view. By analyzing their responses, we extracted two contrasting reasoning patterns: Restricted Rule-based reasoning (RR reasoning) and Big Idea-based reasoning (BI reasoning). Each reasoning pattern was analyzed more specifically and meanings of the students' responses were discussed. Four frictional force rules frequently used by students who demonstrated RR reasoning were also extracted from students' responses. It was also concluded that students in the BI reasoning group showed better performance in deciding the direction of frictional force than students in RR reasoning group. Students prefer a particular reasoning pattern due their background beliefs concerning the nature of scientific inquiry, causality, or reality.