A Cross-Grade Study Validating the Evolutionary Pathway of Student Mental Models in Electric Circuits

Abstract

Cross-grade studies are valuable for the development of sequential curriculum. However such studies are time and resource intensive and fail to provide a clear representation to integrate different levels of representational complexity. Lin (Lin, 2006;Lin, Chiu, & Hsu, 2006) proposed a cladistics approach in conceptual evolution to construct a hypothetical Conceptual Evolution Tree (CET; also called Evolutionary Pathway of Student Mental Models) in electric circuits which overcome the limitations of earlier cross-grade studies. The aims of this study are to validate this hypothesis and to integrate with the CET graph to better understand Taiwanese students' conceptual evolution in electric circuits. This study uses a web-based mental model diagnosis system to collect 1,441 cross-grade students' data. The results show that the empirical cross-grade survey data closely meet the hypothesis. The CET graph in electric circuits well explains the relationship between student conceptual evolution from Grade 1 to 9 and the curriculum influences by comparing to the empirical data. The validated CET graph in electric circuits could be a useful tool for science educators in designing sequential curriculum content.

Students Mental Models of Solid Elasticity: A Mixed Method Study

“…The present research revealed that employing a mixed method generates different results from, previous researches (Lin, 2017). Research findings suggested that the PBL learning model improved the students' mental models of elasticity.…”

Modeling competence in science education

“…CET provides a representation of the evolutionary pathways of students' mental models about a specific topic, and can be verified by cross-grade investigation or previous empirical studies. Several topics have been explored and validated by cross-grade investigation in our team, such as electric circuit (Lin, 2006(Lin, , 2017, phase transitions , shape of the earth (Wu & Lin, 2013), and ideal gas (Chiu, Wu, Chung, Li, & P., 2013).…”

Volume 13 Issue 10 Complete Issue

“…E. F first set the education as an input to human capital (Denison, 1983;, and made a research to calculate "the return of educational capital" to measure "the contribution of education investment to the economy", and in China, many scholars have made great achievement in the quantitative measurement of the contribution rate of higher education investment to regional economic growth ( Hui Min Qian, 2013;Lin, 2017;Song et al, 2017).…”

“…According to Sara's summary of residents' anxiety type about recycled water reuse, it can be seen that residents' concerns about recycled water reuse are mainly about not only the health risks that recycled water reuse may bring to themselves and their family members but also the impact on the local environment. Thus, this section focuses on investigating residents' risk perception for recycled water reuse from these two aspects (Ross, 2014;Lin, 2017). In order to simplify the calculation of the directness of each potential variable, the data x'= 8-x is adjusted after the risk-perception facet data of recycled water reuse is substituted into the forward data direction of the model, if the original data is x.…”