Force
Forces and Motion
| Electricity and Magnetism
Thinking about actions to take: Non-Contact Forces
Teaching Guidance
for 11-14
There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:
Try these
- Giving real experiences of forces acting at a distance
- Exploiting the tangible effects of magnets in regions of space around the magnet
- Keeping magnetic, electric and gravity forces and their effects separate
- Exploiting similarities of behaviour between the forces
- Sharing some of the struggles that clever people had with action-at-a-distance in the past
- Dealing with mass and the force of gravity acting on an object by sharing the reasons for caring about the difference
- Discussing the assumed universality of these forces, and sharing some of the evidence for that
Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narrative to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Teaching Approaches for some examples of activities.
Avoid these
- Treating action-at-a-distance as obviously acceptable
- Acting as if the similarities between the three non-contact forces always have been obvious
- Over-emphasising the similarities
- Conflating the terminology and representations for the three different forces
Teacher Tip: These difficulties are distilled from: the research findings; the practice of well-connected teachers with expertise; issues intrinsic to representing the physics well.