Four-Tier Multirepresentation Diagnostic Test for Identifying Students’ Misconception on Uniform Circular Motion

Abstract

This study aims to analyze students' misconceptions on the topic of uniform circular motion using a four-tier diagnostic test based on multi-representation. The use of a four-tier diagnostic test based on multi-representation is expected to be able to identify students' misconceptions more deeply because it not only analyzes students' answers and reasons, but also the level of students' beliefs in various forms of representation, namely macroscopic, microscopic, symbolic, and graphic. This study used a quantitative descriptive method involving 100 high school students’ who had studied the material of regular circular motion. Data were analyzed by grouping students' answers into five categories, namely scientific conception, misconception, lack of knowledge, false positive, and false negative. The results showed that the misconception category had the highest percentage of 37.17 percent, which indicates that students still have difficulty in connecting concepts to various forms of representation. Misconceptions were more common in macroscopic and symbolic representations, especially in understanding the direction of centripetal acceleration and the relationship between quantities in regular circular motion. These findings indicate that students' conceptual understanding has not been fully formed. Therefore, physics learning needs to integrate various forms of representation so that students' conceptual understanding becomes more comprehensive. However, this study is limited to descriptive analysis in one school so that the factors causing misconceptions have not been studied in depth.