Misconception of sound and conceptual change: A cross‐sectional study on students' materialistic thinking of sound

Abstract

There is a concern that materialistic thinking—meaning the tendency to attribute a set of matter‐like properties to nonmatter concepts—is one of the central barriers that students face in the journey toward understanding scientific concepts. The cross‐sectional study presented here used the Sound Concept Inventory Instrument (SCII) (Eshach, [], Physical Review Physics Education Research, 10, 010202) to examine how Taiwanese students (N = 717: Grade 7 to undergraduate level) associate the nonmaterial concept of sound with this set of (erroneous) materialistic properties and/or with the (correct) scientific view. Its results show that students in all academic level groups associated sound, at least to some extent, with all of the materialistic properties defined in the instrument. Grades 7–9 evidenced the greatest amount of materialistic thinking, followed by Grade 11, with the lowest levels of materialistic thinking being shown by Grades 10 and 12, as well as university students. We also found that the respondents' confidence in the materialistic view they expressed was high. The results suggest that the extent to which students associate sound with materialistic thinking is not ordered by academic level, but was rather influenced by the immediate relevance of each group's recent curriculum to the topic of sound. This article concludes by examining the results through the lens of several different theories of conceptual change, and by making suggestions, in light of these results, for how the teaching of sound concepts might be improved.

A Review of Students’ Common Misconceptions in Science and Their Diagnostic Assessment Tools

“…To cope with the limitations of multiple-choice tests, a multiple-tiers test was developed in various recent studies. Energy and momentums (Dalaklioğlu & Sekercioğlu, 2015) Fluid static (Kusairi et al, 2017) Impulse and momentums (Soeharto, 2016;Samsudin et al, 2015) Temperature and heat (Madu & Orji, 2015;Asri et al, 2017) Sport physics (Kartiko, 2018) Energy and force (Nwafor et al, 2015) Newtons' Law (Ergin, 2016) Electric circuits (Sadler & Sonnert, 2016) Gases (Çetin et al, 2009) Physical concept (Wind & Gale,2015) Heat transfer (Wibowo et al, 2016) Thermal physics (Malik et al, 2019) Moon phase (Saenpuk & Ruangsuwan, 2019) Energy material (Wijayanti et al, 2018) Light (Wartono & Putirulan, 2018) Heat concept (Haryono, 2018) Solid matter and pressure liquid substances (Handhika et al, 2018) Sound (Eshach et al, 2018) Hydrostatic pressure and Archimedes law (Berek et al, 2016) Chemistry Municipal chemistry (Milenković et al, 2016b) Chemical bonding (Vrabec & Proksǎ, 2016;Enawaty & Sartika, 2015) Enzyme Interacts (Linenberger & Bretz, 2015) Chemical bonding and spontaneity (Ikenna, 2015) Electrochemistry (Önder, 2017) Acid-base (Sadhu et al, 2017;Sadhu, 2019) Acid-base and solubility equilibrium. (Masykuri & Rahardjo, 2018) Biology Photosynthesis (Orbanić et al, 2016) Evolution of biology (Putri et al, 2017;Helmi et al, 2019) Natural science (Subayani, 2016;Murti & Aminah, 2019) Global warming (Fajarini et al, 2018) Ecology…”

“…Because of that matter, some researches had been held to provide information about student understanding, especially in learning science concepts. The different insight of student concepts had been defined by a number of terms like "alternative conceptions" (Wandersee et al, 1994), "conceptual difficulties" (Stefanidou et al, 2019), "misconceptions " (Eshach et al, 2018), "mental models" (Wuellner et al, 2017), and others.…”

Introducing the idea of entropy to the ontological category shift theory for conceptual change: The case of heat and sound

“…Thus, even if students start viewing a certain phenomenon as a process, it is the wrong process mechanism that they have in mind. For instance, in a series of studies on sound [6,21,22], Eshach showed that students attribute materialistic characteristics to sound, and even if they view sound as a process of propagation from one place to another, they still view this process as a direct one (e.g., as a kind of substance that is being pushed and moved from a sound source to a listener). They do not see sound as an emergent process resulting from random collisions between a medium's particles.…”

“…Indeed, many researchers show that learners "…face obstacles in mapping abstract, theoretical understanding of thermodynamic principles" [26] (p. 704). One of the barriers students may face stem from their materialistic thinking, which is defined by Eshach et al [22] as their tendency to associate materialistic properties to scientific concepts. Indeed, Reiner et al [12] and Chi [1,3] argue that naïve students tend to assign heat to the entities category, and thus explain phenomena related to heat in terms of matter and the characteristics they attribute to matter.…”

Students’and Teachers’ Perception of Scientific Models: Transition From Daily to Scientific Language

“…There are multifaceted reasons behind this phenomenon, and one of which is the difficulty of forming a conceptual change from learners' prior understanding. Similar to learning scientific concepts such as sound, pressure, balance and so on (Eshach, Lin, & Tsai, 2018;Ozkan & Selcuk, 2016), learners need to move from an everyday concept to a scientific one. In many cases, the intended conceptual change happens, but others form a misconception (alternative concept), and some maintain their intact preconception.…”