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... As Dewey says, students
can be trained to notice acceleration, but it takes a LOT of
careful work. I don't think it takes nearly as much work (in
fact, I don't really think it takes *any* work) to get students to
notice that "degree of squashing"--even of other objects--is
directly related to the amount of force applied. John Clement's
bridging analogies make effective use of students' innate
understanding of such connections.
Finally, whether forces are so obvious to physicists or not, it is
abundantly clear that what *students* think of and refer to as force is not
the same thing as most physicists in many ways. ...
... So, I don't see either the
scientists' version of acceleration *or* the scientists' version of force
as being *either* more or less an abstract invention when one starts from
what I understand to be the students' typical view.