Between Force and Curvature: A Multimodal Analysis of Competing Conceptual Zones for Gravity in High School Students

by Maira Giovana de Souza (Caxias do Sul University)

Friday 27 Nov 2026, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Zurich

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From the big bang to black holes, from elementary particles and the fundamental interactions that govern our universe to the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments, our knowledge of the world builds on modern physics. To make our current-best understanding available to all, we need to invest in educational research and bridge the gap between those who know science, those who teach science, and those who learn science. 

This month, we will discuss a paper by Maira Giovana de Souza, Agostinho Serrano & David Treagust 

Abstract: 

This study investigates how high school students simultaneously employ two modes of conceptualising gravity, force/attraction and curvature/geometry, when reasoning about gravitational phenomena. Drawing on the conceptual profile perspective, we examined how these modes coexist and distribute across different cognitive contexts and expressive modalities. Through multimodal analysis combining depictive gesture analysis, speech, drawings, and written responses, we investigated eight Brazilian Year-12 students who participated in a Special and General Relativity course. Data were collected from classroom discussions, written exercises, and individual interviews, enabling triangulation across spontaneous collaborative reasoning, deliberate written formulation, and retrospective individual explanation. Results reveal that (1) the two modes coexist actively within the same students rather than replacing one another; (2) their activation depends systematically on the type of cognitive demand, the geometric mode predominates in descriptive contexts while the force mode emerges in causal explanations; (3) pictorial modalities preferentially access the geometric mode even when speech accesses the force mode, producing multimodal discordances. These findings suggest that the conceptual transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian gravity involves a prolonged coexistence of conceptual zones rather than a substitution, and that multimodal analysis reveals aspects of students’ conceptual repertoire that remain hidden in purely verbal analysis. Connections with the gesture-speech mismatch literature are discussed.

Paper:

de Souza, M.G., Serrano, A. & Treagust, D. Between Force and Curvature: A Multimodal Analysis of Competing Conceptual Zones for Gravity in High School Students. Int J of Sci and Math Educ 24, 90 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-026-10713-8