Social Metaphorical Mapping of the Concept of Force “CHI‐KA‐RA” in Japanese

Abstract

This research focused on the concept of “force” (“CHI‐KA‐RA” in Japanese) in Newtonian mechanics. The primary objective was to develop a tool, based on metaphor, to interpret student thinking in learning scientific topics. The study provides an example of using the tool to trace the process of mutual changes in thinking during a dialog among students who have different perspectives on the same topic. “Social metaphorical mapping” was used to interpret a dialog between two groups of junior high school students with different epistemological paradigms with regard to the concept of force (CHI‐KA‐RA) in the learning environment of a computer simulation. Both source domains were recontextualized through social metaphorical mapping and the process of mutual changes in concepts was traced. Participants noticed that the Buridanian ¹ concept of“force” differs from the Newtonian concept of “force,” differentiated between the concepts of “force” that use the same Japanese term “CHI‐KA‐RA,” and noticed that the Buridanian concept of “force” resembles the Newtonian concept of “momentum.”

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported in part by Grants‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research provided by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan (No. 17011042 to Mariko Suzuki). The author would like to express appreciations to Randy McGinnis, David Hammer, Edward Redish, Janet Coffey, Shirley Thompson, Masakata Ogawa, Naoki Ueno, Yuji Moro, Hayashi Nakayama, Tomoko Nagata, Jun Nakahara, Toshiyuki Kihara, and Yuhei Yamauchi who made valuable comments on the draft, and also to reviewers for their valuable advices. The author wishes to thank Emily van Zee, University of Maryland at College Park, for her assistance in preparing this manuscript. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the funding agencies.

Notes

1. Buridan was a French scientist in the fourteenth century who proposed a theory of impetus.

2. Participants were junior high school students. “Quasi‐Buridanians” and “quasi‐Newtonians” were in the process of learning Newtonian mechanics, so labeling them “Buridanians” or “Newtonians” would be problematic.

3. Findings for these learning activities were reported in a Japanese journal (Suzuki, 1996).

4. Again, findings for these learning activities were reported in a Japanese journal (Suzuki, 1996).

5. In the situation describing “falling motion,” the directions of gravity and motion are same. Students drew one arrow in this situation.

6. The horizontal line within the circle is used to indicate whether the ball is rolling or not. If the arrow of the force were not set to the center of gravity of the object, rolling momentum would occur; the horizontal line in the right side of the circle would indicate this rolling.