Background: Research regarding students’ ideas about the nature of sound reveals a variety of conceptions about sound. In order to reconstruct these ideas and explain sound phenomena, researchers’ teaching interventions often make use of everyday-life contexts. However existing research on sound only partially addresses the correlation between the properties of sound and its perceptive characteristics.
Purpose: To identify the evolution of students’ conceptions regarding the nature of sound and its properties (frequency, intensity and frequency spectrum) through a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) about sound phenomena in an authentic musical context. The described TLS consists of three activities aiming students to correlate the properties of sound waves (frequency, intensity and frequency spectrum) with its perceptive characteristics (pitch, loudness and timbre) via the use of smartphone applications.
Sample: Eight students, in the second year of their studies in the Department of Primary Education of the XXX University.
Design and methods: Students’ perspectives on sound and their progression are investigated through a teaching experiment design. Data are collected by recording students’ interviews. Due to the explorative nature of the research qualitative methods of content analysis are used.
Results: The results show that the students’ perspectives on sound evolved, as students managed to consolidate links between their everyday experience of sounds and the underlying science concepts as frequency, intensity and frequency spectrum. The authentic environment and the use of the smartphone’s applications were key factors for the success of the teaching experiment. The interaction with the activities shifted student’s conceptualizations closer to the scientific ones, by communicating every day sound experiences with their scientific interpretation. 相似文献
Computers in education have been around for more than 30 years. They have been the vector not only of diverse forms of educational technology, but also of many new kinds of learning activities using software instruments. With the gradual trivialization of computer systems, the initially rather positive expectations about computers in education have progressively turned into more skeptical attitudes about the use of ICT. What is really working with computers in education? Was the investment worth the outcomes? The number of scientific studies focusing on these issues is huge. Most of their results have been obtained either by very focused experiments on some educational technology, generally involving a limited number of students, or by surveys, taking into account large numbers of learners but with little control about the kind of activities that were actually organized. Overall, hardly any conclusive results about possible causal implications of using ICT in learning have been obtained and there is no evidence about the stability of existing results over time. This paper, particularly taking into account the French experience, draws attention on the specific case of software instruments. These instruments do not exactly aim at performing more efficiently existing activities, but lead to invent new learning activities better in line with constructivist views. It suggests that, besides studies about what works, more research is in order about how it works and contends that what will work in the future is linked to the capability of the teaching profession and their allies to collectively build and discuss new interrogations and solutions to pedagogical problems, which will sustain and regulate the many discoveries of innovators. 相似文献
