Making Meaning Of Mass Variable In Race Problems

This study aims to investigate how middle school students make meaning the relationship between mass of vehicles and their speed on a horizontal plane. Accordingly, students’’ schemes constructed from daily life observations for concepts such as the concept of mass and differences between schemes and variables including level of class and gender were investigated. Race Question Set developed by authors was administrated to 738 middle school students. A descriptive study (relational-screening model) was adopted for analyzing students’ answers. Findings obtained indicated that mass of vehicles was important but that was not a single criterion for predicting race result among students.