A number of studies have indicated however, that students are not very consistent
in the way in which they apply their conceptions. For example, Galili and
Bar (1997) found that students had a number of conceptions about weight, and
that, ‘children’s applications of these schemata might be mutually contradictory in
different physical situations’ (p. 317). Halloun and Hestenes (1985) investigated
university physics students’ ideas about linear and projectile motion and concluded
that they used a mixture of ideas and were typically inconsistent in the
way in which they applied the same concept in different situations. Watson et al.