Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In Central Switzerland, pre-service teacher education is intended to reflect the integrated concept of science education in school. The project presented in this chapter assists the development of a research-based unit on integrated science for first-year students. The theoretical background underpinning the research process is provided by the model of educational reconstruction adapted to the settings of universities. The result of this process reflects three important aspects of educational reconstruction: content, concepts and methods. On the level of content, it provides ten suitable topics, which successfully integrate human biology and physics. On the level of concept, it reveals a characteristic self-concept of the involved students and also stimulated conceptual change in questions of integrated science education. On the level of methods, the concept of ’Unterrichtsminiaturen’ evolves into the new concept of educational miniatures, a method that proves to be especially effective in the pre-service education training of science teachers

Learning processes will be analysed as “evolution of student’s ideas” or as “conceptual change” on a timescale of several hours. The idea is to follow a single student’s constructions “during” the whole process of learning in more detail, including analyses of learning effects. Part two discusses theoretical and methodological issues of such learning process studies. Here, the focus is on the unit of analysis (expressed ideas or conceptions) and on the relation between teaching and learning. In part three, a more recent study about the evolution of students’ ideas about gases is presented, describing learning by using three categories: A student expresses a new idea, a student increases the domain of validity of an idea, or a student establishes a link between several ideas and develops a network. In part four, another more recent study about analysing learning effects of the learning environment on single students learning is presented. Here, different types of resonances are used as categories, e.g. congruent or disgruent resonance, spontaneous or retarded resonance. Both studies come to grounded hypotheses how to improve teaching. In part five, more general issues about learning process studies are discussed

This paper presents a case study with a group of 11th grade students solving a problem about the centripetal force that an object needs in order to follow a circular motion. The focus is on the process of development by the students of (a) the meanings in terms of semantic relationships among concepts and of these with the context; and (b) a purposeful heuristic during the process of solving the task. This process is examined in terms of contextualizing practices (Lemke, 1990; Jiménez-Aleixandre & Reigosa, 2006), creation of meanings through the connections established among actions and their context. The results are interpreted as transformations by the students of concepts as centripetal force or speed into knowledge tools for solving the problems

This chapter describes the formulation of a model of formative assessment as it has emerged through a series of collaborative research and development activities with teachers. The aspiration is to articulate our emerging understanding of a complex set of interacting factors in an integrated and coherent manner. Though necessarily tentative, the model will serve to guide our future research activities as well as offering a perspective on the research of others. A specific approach to conceptual change is at the heart of the model, which attempts to extrapolate from constructivism as a theory of learning to its applications to the practice of teaching. Our approach integrates domain-specific elements – hypothesised conceptual trajectories that re-occur in science learning – with domain-general elements. The latter describe recurring cycles of interaction between teachers and pupils that might occur in any curricular domain. Some of the cost-benefits to teachers in their approach to the implementation of formative assessment practices are discussed. It is suggested that an implication of the suggested approach is the need to conduct and share more empirical research into pupils’ conceptual development, nationally and internationally

This study deals with students working with a hypermedia that links a bank of chemical movies. Two aspects were examined: (i) the factors (such as surface features) that prevail to the choice of movies by students that use the hypermedia; (ii) the kinds of information that students are able to memorise. The research questions were formulated as (i) How chemical movies are chosen by students who have to answer questions about chemistry? and (ii) How difficult is it to memorise conceptual information from such movies? The films were specifically produced for this research, several of them with two possible narrations: one with a description as perceptible as possible of the pictures of the movie, the other with a maximum of chemical terms. In a first experiment, six pairs of 17-year-old students were given a set of questions to answer with the hypermedia. In a second one, four students were given a series of seven movies to be used, and were questioned after 7 days. The most occurring factors for choosing movies were surface features, but we observed students making their choice after reformulating a question. It also happened that a pair of students chose a movie more than once. Low memorisation seems to occur with movies that display several events, such as chemical reactions. After 7 days, students remembered more pictures of the movie than words of the narration, and from the picture, more icons than animations or photos, and almost no symbols

Some ways of looking at – and seeing – micro-organisms by lower secondary school pupils (ranging in age from 11 to 14) have been singled out by means of the administration of a questionnaire and by encouraging pupils to reason out their answers. The study confirms the need to induce pupils to express their prior knowledge in order to improve teaching; allows the collection of a number of very popular misconceptions (mould infecting food after it goes bad and why; micro-organisms travelling throughout the body and why; good and bad bacteria facing-off in combat in our body); and indicate mass media (mainly advertising spots and TV programmes) as pupils’ elective source of information in the absence of any contribution at Italian school

The research study which is set out here constitutes one stage of a project whose goal is to develop situations for the teaching and learning of electricity at university level. The subject of electricity continues to be widely regarded by students as difficult and therefore unattractive. A particular problem is the relation between electrostatics and electrokinetics in calculus-based physics courses in first-year university courses. This research study has allowed us both to check the university students’ learning of the basic concepts of electricity, in particular electrical potential and capacitance, and to define the important conceptual difficulties that students came across when studying electricity and more precisely processes of electrical charge of bodies. Difficulties in analyzing the processes of charge of bodies from a systemic and energetic point of view are discussed. These results will be used to elaborate contents and situations for the teaching and learning of electricity at university level

While there has been considerable research on children’s understanding of evaporation, the representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. This study explored students’ engagement with evaporation phenomena through various representational modes. Primary school classroom sequences and structured interviews shortly after, and a year later, indicated significant advances in learning flowing from negotiation of meaning around particle representations. A case study of one child’s learning is used to demonstrate how a molecular distribution representation can offer the possibility of significant advances in children’s thinking about evaporation. The findings suggest that teacher-mediated negotiation of representational issues can support enriched student learning

This work analyses possible deficiencies in conventional teaching when the concepts of substance and chemical change are introduced. These deficiencies may be caused, in our opinion, by not taking into account the History and Epistemology of Chemistry. When teaching chemical reactions, the relationship between the two levels of representation – macroscopic, introduced with the empiricist model during the 16th and 18th centuries and microscopic from the 19th-century classical atomic model – are often forgotten. This study analyses chemistry teachers’ opinions on these subjects and the way they are presented in textbooks. The results obtained confirm the existence of significant conceptual and epistemological teaching deficiencies, such as failing to introduce the macro and microscopic definitions of substance and the lack of references to both levels in the presentation of chemical reactions

The present contribution deals with the educational methods which would support education of young people and the whole society in science. After the historical overview the methods of formal, informal and non-formal education are described. The main attention is devoted to the non-formal methods which are important in the formation of the top level of talented young people, who represent the decisive element of the effective and sustainable development of the society and its competitiveness