This study investigated the effect of metaconceptual teaching interventions on students' understanding of force and motion concepts. A multimethod research design including quasi-experimental design and case study designs was employed to compare the effect of the metaconceptual activities and traditional instruction and investigate students' reactions to metaconceptual teaching interventions. The participants (45 high school students in the USA) were enrolled in one of the two physics classes instructed by the same science teacher. In the experimental group, students' engagement in metaconceptual knowledge and processes was facilitated through various instructional activities, including poster drawing, journal writing, group debate, concept mapping, and class and group discussions. These activities were intended to facilitate students' engagement in (a) becoming aware of their existing and past conceptions, associated beliefs, everyday experiences, and contextual differences, (b) monitoring their understanding of the new conception, the changes in ideas, and the consistency between existing and new conceptions, and (c) evaluating the relative ability of competing conceptions to explain a physical phenomenon. In the comparison group, the same content knowledge was explained by the teacher along with the use of laboratory experiments, demonstrations, and quantitative problem solving. Students' reactions to the designed instructional activities indicated that metaconceptual teaching interventions were successful in facilitating students' engagement in several types of metaconceptual functioning. The results showed that students in the experimental group had significantly better conceptual understanding than their counterparts in the comparison group and this positive impact remained after a period of 9 weeks.

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This study investigated the effect of conceptual change text-oriented instruction over traditional instruction on students' understanding of cellular respiration concepts and their attitudes toward biology as a school subject. The sample of this study consisted of 84 eleventh-grade students from four classes of a high school. Two of the classes were assigned randomly to the control group, and the other two classes were assigned randomly to the experimental group. During teaching the topic of cellular respiration concepts in biology curriculum, the experimental group was taught with the conceptual change text-oriented instruction whereas the control group was taught with the traditional instruction. The results showed that the students in the experimental group performed better with respect to cellular respiration concepts. In addition, it has been found that there was no significant difference between the attitudes of students in the experimental and control groups toward biology as a school subject.Keywords: Conceptual change instruction, cellular respiration concepts, attitudes toward biology.In recent years, many researchers in science education have focused on students' conceptual development and cognitive processes [1][2][3][4]. They mainly accepted that each student had a different cognitive structure because of their different abilities, backgrounds, attitudes, and experiences. According to Piaget [5], students construct new knowledge on their previous cognitive structures. Therefore, students may generate different meanings from upcoming information because of their different cognitive structures. Students' views and explanations of science concepts may differ from those generally accepted by the scientists. Alternative views were given in various terms including "children science" [6, 7], "alternative frameworks" [8, 9], "naive beliefs" [10], "preconceptions" [11], and "misconceptions" [12].Over the last two decades, a large number of studies has been conducted on misconceptions in science [3, 4,11,[13][14][15][16]. Students' interpretations of observed phenomena and information obtained from school experiences were sometimes found to be scientifically incorrect and significantly different from the ideas that their teachers intended to convey. Studies in the science education aimed at determining students' understanding of biology concepts have revealed many misconceptions. This is the case in biology subjects such as photosynthesis [17] [23]. Many of these concepts about which students hold misconceptions are basic to biology knowledge and are interrelated. Concepts related to the cellular respiration are among such concepts. These studies demonstrated that students have several misconceptions regarding the cellular respiration concepts [24 -26].The study carried out by Songer and Mintzes [25] with 200 novice and experienced students indicated that students had difficulties in understanding the role of oxygen in cellular respiration. Students thought that O 2 is used in all steps of glucose reduction r...

The aim of this paper was to describe the changes in one student's ideas about force and one-dimensional motion concepts and portray the relevant metaconceptual processes that she engaged in during the implementation of metaconceptual teaching interventions. Metaconceptual processes involves metacognitive processes that are directly acting on or related to individuals' conceptions, mental models or elements of their conceptual ecology. Several types of instructional activities including poster drawing, concept mapping, group debate, journal writing and group and class discussions were used to activate students' metaconceptual processes. The findings of the study indicated that the student changed all of her alternative ideas that were assessed before the instruction with scientifically accepted conceptions following the instruction. The findings also showed that the student engaged in several types of metaconceptual processes ranging from simple awareness of ideas to more sophisticated metaconceptual processes, such as metaconceptual monitoring and evaluation. The findings strengthen the claims about the positive impact of metaconceptual processes on changing students' conceptions of physical world.

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