Contextualized physics problems require more than the application of a familiar law: Students must reconstruct a physical system from ordinary language, distributed information, technical devices, and real-world constraints. This qualitative-dominant embedded multiple-case study examined where that reconstruction breaks down among Chinese senior high school students and how classroom and assessment conditions shape the process. The evidence base comprised 8 expert reviews, 12 student cognitive interviews, 24 task-linked student case records selected by school, grade, and performance stratum from a 420-case sampling frame, 15 physics-teacher interviews, and 4 interviews with research or curriculum leaders. Analysis used a recursively connected six-phase framework: context decoding, information structuring, model and idealization, representational translation, solution and monitoring, and interpretation and validation. Four conditions emerged across sources: examination tempo and process compression, contextual-experience fairness, scaffold dependence and fading, and assessment-evidence misalignment. Among the 24 purposefully selected student cases, representational translation was most frequently assigned as the dominant difficulty (10 cases) and remained visible in every performance stratum. Lower-performing cases showed broader cascades across early decoding, model selection, representation, and monitoring; middle-performing cases often knew the relevant law but lost hidden conditions or multi-stage connections. Higher-performing cases generally repaired early breakdowns but still compressed explanation, model boundaries, and transfer. Cross-case analysis produced a recursive mechanism in which early structuring disruption encourages formula-first shortcuts, weakens model-representation coordination, narrows monitoring to arithmetic, and produces premature numerical closure. Examination pace and answer-centered scoring amplify this cycle, whereas phase-specific prompts, explicit representation mapping, model comparison, reasonableness checks, and deliberate scaffold fading provide interruption points. The study contributes a process-based account of contextualized physics difficulty and argues that assessment should capture the evidence chain from situation to model and interpretation rather than reward only the final answer.
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Tai, H. (2026) From Real-world Contexts to Physics Models: Chinese Senior High School Students’ Difficulties in Solving Contextualized Physics Problems. Global Education Bulletin, 3(3), 64-80. https://doi.org/10.71052/grb2025/DQMQ8251