Evaluation of Engineering students' translation skills in Newton's laws of motion using Newman's error analysis

This study evaluated the translation skills of students across Newton’s laws of motion representations through a standardized diagnostic test. One of the objectives of this study is to provide significant insights to science educators seeking to improve the quality of physics teaching. This will guide the development of effective teaching strategies or a study guide that could improve students’ comprehension and application of scientific concepts. The study employed purposive sampling, with a total of 178 respondents who were engineering students from different programs. The study’s findings can provide insights into respondents’ proficiency in interpreting Newton’s laws of motion across various forms of representation. A quantitative approach using statistical analysis of diagnostic exam results, graded with a specialized rubric, was employed. The results showed that students excelled in solving problems involving diagrams but struggled with equations and textual descriptions. Newman’s error analysis is a method used to examine the mistakes made by participants in solving mathematical problems. These errors can be classified into different categories, such as reading, comprehension, transformation, process skills, and encoding errors. Newman’s error analysis identified transformation errors as the participants’ most frequent mistakes, followed by encoding and process skills errors. Furthermore, two-way ANOVA analysis revealed significant effects of year-level and program of study on test scores of respondents, indicating that as student progress to higher-level physics courses, their understanding and application of Newton’s laws of motion also improves. This study makes a valuable contribution to the field of physics education by highlighting the importance of translation skills, aiming to improve teaching methods for better comprehension of scientific principles.