Helping Pre-Service Science Teachers to Understand Atomism Through Observations and Experiments

Abstract

Current atom concept teachings haven’t reached required levels from the points of both teaching methods and learning attainments. With this purpose in this research atom concept is conveyed to the classroom milieu through observations and experiments related to the atom concept during historical development process starting with the masterpiece of, the carrier of the atom thoughts of Antiquity to our age, Roman philosopher Lucretius, namely De Rerum Natura. The study has conducted thoughts regarding the atom in ancient and subsequent history under six headings teaching modules that would span over 11 weeks. The participants in the study were 73 pre-service science teachers. The two-tier multiple-choice diagnostic test was developed. In the analysis of the results of the test, after test hypotheses were proved, the single-factor ANOVA was employed for related samples, while frequency analysis was used for the content of the views of the participants and percentages were calculated to observe the change in alternative conceptions. Key words: concept of the atom in antiquity, experiments and observations, Titus Lucretius Carus, Two-tier Multiple-Choice Diagnostic test.

Insights into teaching quantum mechanics in secondary and lower undergraduate education

“…However, several articles did describe investigations into the influence of teaching methods on student understanding. This section describes implemented and evaluated instructional strategies that were found within the selected literature [12,22,36,48,49,54,76,[78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89], organized into four groups.…”

“…Strategies based on the historical development of the atomic model were evaluated by Unver and Arabacioglu [88] Classical analogies are also used to promote understanding of the quantum atom model. Budde et al [80] developed the Bremen teaching approach for upper secondary schools, which is based on similarities between the quantum atom model and liquids.…”

“…This suggests that the mix up of classical and quantum concepts is also an important issue at the secondary level. Researchers have proposed several ideas concerning solutions for the mix up of classical and quantum concepts; e.g., analogies should be well defined [36], diagrams should be unambiguous [38,40], and students should have more knowledge of the use of models in physics [12,48,88]. However, the impact of these proposed solutions remains to be investigated.…”

Comparing Pre-Service Primary School Teachers’ and Lower-Secondary Learners’ Understanding the Particulate Nature of Matter

“…points out that about a fifth of LEA s and TEAs consider atoms small pieces of solid bodies, between which there is no space. In Unver and Arabacioglu (2015) the same misconception was studied in a group of preservice science teachers, whose incidence was comparatively high (23.3%). Similar results were shown by the study Özalp and Kahveci (2015), where this misconception was diagnosed in 27.3% ninth graders.…”

“…Research with Pre-service Primary School Teachers Some established studies (e.g., Aydeniz et al, 2017;De Jong et al, 2005;Kiray, 2016;Mumba et al, 2014;Unver & Arabacioglu, 2015) have shown that pre-service science teachers have a great number of misconceptions in the topic of PNM, which could potentially perpetuate the belief of these misconceptions in the future generations of students taught by these teachers. The Valanides study (2000) has focused on the conceptions of primary school teacher trainees related to aspects of dissolving and the effects of filtering or heating solutions.…”