FundaFirst HS gives physics teachers the diagnostic tools to surface the exact misconceptions their students hold — in kinematics, Newton's laws, and energy — and a clear pathway to address them. Free classroom pilots with class-level heatmaps delivered within 48 hours of completion.
Students who score well on formula-based tests often perform worst on conceptual questions. They can calculate without understanding. They don't know what they don't know — and neither do their teachers, until exam results arrive.
Decades of physics education research document persistent misconceptions that survive conventional teaching. A student may solve F = ma problems yet believe a tossed ball carries an upward "force of the throw." The formula hides the failure.
Most physics departments lack tools to systematically surface misconceptions before summative assessments. Teachers discover gaps too late — through exam results instead of targeted diagnostics.
We don't start with the right answers. We start with the wrong ones — because that's where real learning begins. Our approach is grounded in standardised diagnostic instruments like the FCI and TUG-K, and three decades of published physics education research — not opinion.
Every diagnostic uses the same rigorous framework: surface the specific misconception, create cognitive conflict that destabilizes it, then provide structured guidance for rebuilding understanding from first principles. The traps we target are documented across multiple research traditions — from Trowbridge & McDermott's position-velocity confusion studies to Hestenes' Force Concept Inventory and beyond.
Carefully designed diagnostic assessments surface the specific misconceptions a student holds — not just whether they got the answer right, but which wrong mental model they're using. Students are mapped to misconception clusters with clear intervention pathways.
We present scenarios designed to make the misconception fail. When a student's wrong model produces an absurd prediction, the cognitive conflict creates genuine readiness for the correct concept. This is trap-first teaching — it works because it respects how minds actually change.
Only after the old model is destabilized do we introduce operational definitions and correct frameworks. Students build understanding from first principles — not from memorized formulas, but from deeply held intuition about what concepts actually mean.
A two-part suite. Motion Foundations covers position, displacement, velocity, and x–t graph reading. Motion Change covers acceleration, turning points, motion diagrams, and the x/v/a graph chain. Run one — or both. No student accounts needed.
Six focused modules: inertia & impetus, force-motion relationships, contact forces & N3, free-body diagrams, applied forces & friction, and Newton's third law in context. Run one module or the full set.
A single-sitting diagnostic covering what energy actually is, when conservation holds, the work-energy theorem and its subtle failure modes, spring and elastic PE, potential-energy diagram reading, heat vs temperature, and the friction paradox. 24 questions across 11 misconception bands.
Every diagnostic follows the same research-backed framework: diagnose, confront, reconstruct. As the arc grows, teachers gain an interconnected toolkit for building real conceptual understanding — not a collection of disconnected test-prep drills, but a coherent diagnostic layer for the entire physics syllabus.
Operational definitions, displacement, velocity, graph interpretation, and the traps that live in kinematics.
Inertia, force-motion relationships, contact forces, free-body diagrams, friction, and Newton's third law — six focused modules.
What energy is, conservation conditions, the work-energy theorem, spring PE, PE diagrams, heat vs temperature, and the friction paradox.
Five persistent kinematics misconceptions — from the Hill Illusion to the Trowbridge–McDermott Comparison — covering position, velocity, acceleration, turning points, and motion diagrams. Includes an example heatmap and details on the two-diagnostic motion suite.
Download the Motion GuideFive persistent forces misconceptions — from the Impetus Belief to the Ghost / Phantom Force — covering Newton’s laws, free-body diagrams, weight, gravity, and third-law pairing. Includes an example heatmap and details on the six-module diagnostic pilot.
Download the Forces GuideFive persistent energy misconceptions — from the Substance Trap to the Friction Paradox — covering what energy actually is, when conservation holds, the work-energy theorem, potential-energy diagram reading, and heat vs temperature. Includes an example heatmap and details on the Energy diagnostic pilot.
Download the Energy GuideA teacher-facing essay on Laurence Viennot’s research into how students reason about force and motion. Why force-velocity confusion survives instruction, why students invent forces to make scenes feel causally adequate, and what to say in the classroom when a correct answer contradicts intuition.
Read the EssayA teacher-facing essay drawing on I. Bernard Cohen’s history of the first law. Why students believe motion needs a sustaining cause, why that intuition took the best minds in Europe two thousand years to escape, and why naming the difficulty explicitly is part of teaching it well.
Read the EssayA teacher-facing essay drawing on Richard Feynman’s account of conservation. Why “energy is conserved” fails to land, why students treat energy as a stuff that gets used up, and what to say instead so the loss of useful energy is named without denying that the total is intact.
Read the EssayA teacher-facing essay tracing the history from caloric to Rumford and Joule. Why “the hotter cup has more heat” is the caloric model rather than a vocabulary slip, and how to separate temperature, internal energy, heat, and work so the picture of stored heat gives way.
Read the EssayA teacher-facing essay on Carnot, Clausius, and the second law. Why a heat engine must always pass some energy to a colder body — why the cold sink students dismiss as an incidental loss is, in fact, the second law made visible.
Read the EssayEvery student mapped against every question, colour-coded by correctness. Misconception clusters are labelled so you can see exactly which wrong mental models are present — and how widely they’re shared across the class.
A class-wide profile showing performance band distribution, the most prevalent misconception clusters, and where the sharpest gaps sit. Designed so you can brief your Head of Department in two minutes.
Plain-language explanations of each misconception trap your students fell into — what the trap is, why it persists, and what correct understanding looks like. Useful for lesson planning and targeted reteaching.
The everyday phrases and teaching shortcuts that accidentally reinforce misconceptions. A short reference you can share with your department to tighten the language around tricky concepts.
Remediation exercises matched to the misconceptions your class actually holds — not generic revision sheets, but trap-first practice designed to surface and correct the specific errors identified in the diagnostic.
Two sample reports — one written for the classroom teacher, one for the head of department — showing the full deliverable you receive after any FundaFirst diagnostic. Both use illustrative, anonymised data; your own reports are generated from your students’ responses.
The full class-level analysis a teacher receives: misconception heatmap, cohort summary, band profiles, and the remediation toolkit — written to be acted on in the next lesson, with no re-derivation needed.
View the Teacher ReportThe head-of-department view: the same cohort distilled to performance-band distribution, dominant misconception clusters, and the highest-leverage gaps — designed to be read and acted on in a couple of minutes.
View the School-Leader ReportPilot diagnostics, class-level reports, and remediation resources have been delivered to international-school physics cohorts across 5 countries and 3 continents.
I carried out a pilot test of the Physics Misconceptions Diagnostics with my Grade 11 (lower 6th) International Baccalaureate classes, as part of their revision for end of year exams. The tests covered Motion Foundations, Forces and Free-Body Diagrams - topics that are fundamental to the IB course as well as A’ level courses.
The tests were all set up by FundaFirst - all I had to do was point the students to web links. The students found the questions easy to access and to carry out. The information that came back from FundaFirst was incredibly useful, identifying areas where the class and/or individuals were weaker. These areas would have been much harder to identify without the tests. FundaFirst then provided concrete examples of how to address the misconceptions, with work sheets targeting these areas.
I will not hesitate to use FundaFirst’s diagnostic testing with future cohorts!
Our assessments map the specific misconceptions each student holds, sorted into diagnostic clusters with clear intervention pathways your department can act on immediately.
Students complete an online diagnostic via a shared link — no accounts, no installs, no IT overhead. You receive a class-level misconception heatmap showing exactly where understanding breaks down.
Every diagnostic question is grounded in published physics education research (FCI/TUG-K, Arons, Knight, Trowbridge & McDermott). This is structured conceptual assessment informed by decades of cognitive science.
Designed to work across IB DP, AP, A-Level, and GCSE physics. The misconceptions are universal — the diagnostic framework works everywhere.
We're offering free pilots to international schools. Choose from our Motion Diagnostic (Motion Foundations and Motion Change, ~25–35 minutes each), our Newton's Laws Diagnostic (six 15-minute modules), or our Energy Diagnostic (single sitting, ~25–30 minutes). You receive a class-level misconception heatmap within 48 hours of completion, plus a cohort summary and remediation guidance.
FundaFirst HS exists because of a simple observation: students don't fail physics because they're not smart enough. They fail because they carry invisible misconceptions that no one ever surfaces — and these misconceptions persist right through exams, university, and beyond.
We're a team with years of deep, research-backed experience in education — particularly in physics, where the gap between procedural competence and conceptual understanding is widest and most damaging.
Rather than creating another resource that repeats what textbooks already say, we went back to the published research. Our pedagogy draws on research instruments like the FCI and TUG-K, along with Arnold Arons' work on operational definitions, Randall Knight's research-based teaching strategies, Trowbridge & McDermott's foundational work on position-velocity confusion, the fundamental principles approach of Chabay and Sherwood, and Lewis Carroll Epstein's Thinking Physics.
The result is a "trap-first" methodology — one that identifies exactly where students go wrong, uses cognitive conflict to destabilize the misconception, and then rebuilds understanding from first principles. We're building diagnostic tools for this across IB, AP, A-Level, and GCSE Physics — starting with motion & kinematics and Newton's laws.
You can't fix what you can't see. Every diagnostic maps the specific misconceptions a student holds — not just a score, but a roadmap for targeted intervention.
Every trap we document, every diagnostic question we write, every intervention we design is grounded in published physics education research.
Formulas are tools, not understanding. We build the intuition that makes formulas meaningful — so students know why they work, not just how to plug in numbers.
Our diagnostics are built for physics teachers. The heatmap, cohort summary, and remediation guidance are designed to inform teaching decisions — not just produce data.