Understanding the Role of Measurements in Creating Physical Quantities: A Case Study of Learning to Quantify Temperature in Physics Teacher Education

Abstract

Learning to understand the content and meaning of physics' concepts is one of the main goals of physics education. In achieving this understanding, the creation of quantities through quantitative measurements, or rather through quantifying experiments, is a key process. The present article introduces a didactical reconstruction for understanding the construction of the meaning of physical quantities from a network point of view, where the quantities are part of networks and the quantifying experiments build up these networks. As a practical example, we discuss how the quantity temperature is constructed in an instructional unit designed for student teachers and what the learning outcomes are.

Teaching About Thermal Phenomena and Thermodynamics: The Contribution of the History and Philosophy of Science

“…(Zambrano 2005, pp. 1 and 8) Mäntylä and Koponen (2007) developed an epistemological reconstruction of temperature as a measurable quantity. They did not want to produce historical reconstructions 'but instead to use HPS as a starting point for developing and designing suitable didactic solutions, which can be called didactic reconstructions for teaching ' (p. 292).…”

“…9.5.7, temperature is a quantity which cannot be simply defined by a sentence or a formula but needs a progressive construction. The historical path of this scientific construction (see Chang 2004) can be adapted for building a case history which usefully parallels and accompanies the students' learning progression from subjective warm-cold sensations towards the specification of body properties, such as dilatation or pressure, which depend on being colder or warmer, and the successive generalisations leading to absolute thermometer scales that are independent of specific materials (examples of didactic use of this case are given by Mäntylä and Koponen (2007) and Oversby (2009); see Sect. 9.3).…”

Contribuições Da Reconstrução Racional Didática No Desenvolvimento De Concepções Epistemologicamente Mais Aceitáveis Sobre a Natureza Da Ciência E Do Progresso Científico

“…Nesse sentido, Silva et al (2008a) denominam RRD o uso da HFC como um ponto de partida para se desenvolverem e se projetarem soluções didáticas satisfatórias (MÄNTYLÄ & KOPONEN, 2007), que podem se entendidas como reconstruções didáticas para auxiliar o ensino de conceitos científicos (IZQUIER-DO-AYMERICH & ADÚRIZ- BRAVO, 2003). É preciso dizer que, embora a RRD baseie-se na história e filosofia da ciência ao ser elaborada, essas bases são usadas como recursos, pois a intenção não é a obtenção de reconstruções históri-cas completamente autênticas.…”

A Research-Informed Instructional Unit to Teach the Nature of Science to Pre-Service Science Teachers

“…6 The text of the unit has been published in Spanish (Adúriz-Bravo 2005a), Catalan (Adúriz-Bravo 2001b), and Greek (Seroglou and Adúriz-Bravo 2007a). 7 See Izquierdo-Aymerich (2000), Koponen and Mäntylä (2006), Koponen (2007), Mäntylä and Koponen (2007). 2. The internal logic of the classical 'context of justification' of scientific knowledge, focusing on scientific reasoning, a powerful meta-concept that traverses many of our strands (correspondence/rationality, representation/languages, intervention/method, and demarcation/structure).…”

“…See for instance the work ofDuschl (1990),Matthews (1994),McComas (1998), Flick et al (2004,Izquierdo-Aymerich et al (2004),Adúriz-Bravo (2005b), Lederman (2006,Seroglou (2006),Develaki (2007),Koponen (2007), andZemplén (2009). 2 See for instance: Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the 'national science education standards' of the US National Academy of Sciences; the initiatives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; the project La main a`la paˆte from the French Académie des Sciences; UNESCO-OREALC's programme of scientific education for Latin America and the Caribbean; or the Argentine project of primary scientific literacy (PAC) from the Ministry of Education.…”