New Physics: Sae Mulli, Vol. 70, No. 5, May 2020, pp. 466∼480 http://dx.doi.org/10.3938/NPSM.70.466 Factors Triggering Thought Experiments in Small Group Physics Problem-solving Activities Hartono Bancong Department of Physics Education, Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar, Makassar 90221, Indonesia Jinwoong Song * Center for Educational Research, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Korea (Received 04 February 2020 : revised 26 March 2020 : accepted 02 April 2020) This study sought to identify the factors that trigger the emergence of thought experiments when students interact with each other in their groups to solve problem. This study had 12 participants, six master’ s students and six undergraduate students in three diferent universities in Indonesia. The participants were divided into three groups so that each group consisted of four students. Small-group physics problem-solving activities were used for observing the factors that encourage students to construct thought experiments. The results showed fve factors that encourage students to visualize imaginary worlds as an initial step in constructing thought experiments: conficting ideas, similar ideas, support from experienced people, students’ bodily knowledge, and students’ imaginary visual knowledge. This indicates that thought experiments can occur not only because of students’ personal knowledge (imaginary visual knowledge and bodily knowledge) but also because of interactions among students in a group to solve a problem (conficting ideas, similar ideas, and support from experienced people). Therefore, we think that placing students into a group is an efective way not only to encourage students to perform thought experiments by utilizing each other’ s resources and skills but also to increase social interaction and support diversity. PACS numbers: 01.40.Fk, 01.40.Ha, 01.65.+g Keywords: Factors, Thought experiments, Problem-solving, Small-group, Physics education. I. Introduction Scientifc inquiry has been considered as one of the main goals in science education since the 1960s [25]. Sci- entifc inquiry was originally used as an efort to involve students in thinking processes and activities similar to those practiced by scientists [3,16,21,25]. Through scien- tifc inquiry, students will be encouraged to develop the thought processes involved in creating facts, generating new explanations, and justifying explanations [19,21,25]. Throughout the history of physics, there are two types of experimentation that are used by physicists to justify explanations or facts: real experiments and thought ex- periments (TEs) [4, 19, 22, 27, 31]. Real experiments have * E-mail: jwsong@snu.ac.kr been widely accepted by physics educators as a learn- ing tool and well integrated into the curriculum. On the other hand, TEs still receive less attention even though they are inherently embedded in the culture of physics [1,12,27]. The role of TEs cannot be replaced by real ex- periments because TEs allow situations that are usually impossible to be reproduced by real experiments regard- less of the sophistication of the equipment [9, 12]. TEs also idealize the conditions of real experiments with com- plex technical details, experimental errors, and inhibiting factors (heat, friction, etc.) [9, 12]. In addition, TEs are indispensable in teaching modern physics: the relativity theories and quantum mechanics, where real experiments are practically impossible to be implemented in regular classroom activities and multimedia tools very often fail [12]. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.