Are most students in physics courses acquiring a sound conceptual grasp of basic physics principles? For many years physicists doing research in physics education have been convinced that they are not. Recently, large studies of students' ba sic conceptual knowledge before and after introductory physics courses. have convinced some in the larger community of physics teachers that there is less basic understanding than they had believed. The results of these studies show that students in good universities, students who are able to solve many problems involving equations of motion in traditional problems, fail to agree with physicists when they answer the simplest conceptual questions. Although a Newtonian framework is essential to understand ing non-relativistic (and later relativistic) motion, it is common for more than 80% of students to answer questions from a non-Newtonian point of view after an introductory physics course. Such students may believe, for example,that a net force is requi red to keep an object in motion at a constant velocity and that acceleration must increase as velocity increases. Standard instruction only changes the point of view of 5 to 10% of the students.
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