Promoting Students’ Interest and Motivation Towards Science Learning: the Role of Personal Needs and Motivation Orientations

This study aimed to design a teaching sequence for science education that enabled lower secondary school students to enhance their motivation towards science. Further, it looked to examine the way the designed teaching sequence affected students with different motivational profiles. Industry site visits, with embodied theory-based motivational features were included as part of the designed teaching sequence. The sequence was implemented in Finland and Greece with 54 participants, 27 from each country. Quantitative data was collected using the Evaluation of Science Inquiry Activities Questionnaire, based on the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory but did not map the expected outcomes. Interviews, however, showed that students with different motivational profiles found aspects within the module that met their psychological needs as explained by Self-Determination Theory. The results offer a perspective to adolescents’ psychological needs along with some insights into how students mediate the way they value an activity in the context of science education.     

Causal structures and counter‐intuitive experiments in electricity

This study focuses on the similarities and differences in structure and meaning between pupils’ conceptions about steady state tasks and evolutionary tasks, in which the system under study undergoes changes over time. A nine‐item written questionnaire was given to 197 Greek secondary school pupils. Results showed that the majority of pupils employ causal structures for their predictions. Two models were identified: a ‘give’ model, applied by pupils in steady‐state tasks; and a ‘take’ model, applied in evolutionary tasks. Structural similarities and semantic differences were identified between these models. In the light of these results, the study also examined the types of experiments in introductory electricity that would or would not obtain a counter‐intuitive reaction in pupils.     

Consistent and Inconsistent Pupils' Reasoning about Intensive Quantities: The Case of Density and Pressure

In this research we investigate whether the categorisation of physical quantities into intensive and extensive, according to scientific knowledge, is perceivable and understood by pupils aged 12–15 years. For this purpose we administered written questionnaires to 300 pupils, comprising four tasks for each intensive quantity: density and pressure. The tasks investigate whether pupils realise that intensive quantities do not depend on the amount of the system they refer to and the factors affecting pupils' reasoning and their consistency when studying phenomena involving fluids at rest or in transition. The analysis of responses led us to identify three models of consistent pupils' reasoning. It was also observed that a significant percentage of the pupils provide inconsistent answers, that is, they change their reasoning across tasks and use alternatives to scientific reasoning, influenced by phenomenological features of the tasks. According to our results we propose a number of recommendations, such as the introduction of intermediate teaching/learning steps to be followed as well as suitable experiments to be used towards the acquisition of the scientific model for density and pressure.     

HOW STUDENT TEACHERS UNDERSTAND DISTANCE FORCE INTERACTIONS IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS

In this paper, we describe empirical research on the recording of primary school and preschool student teacher conceptions of the concept of distant force interactions in different contexts related to the school curriculum for this subject. For this objective to be achieved, we undertook ten semi-structured interviews with student teachers. Based on the findings from these interviews, we developed a written ten-item questionnaire that was distributed to 264 first-year student teachers at three Greek universities. The main findings of our research are that a significant number of students: (i) experience difficulty in recognizing the interactions in different contexts, and even in different cases within the same context; (ii) place the arrow representing the force on the body that exerts it and not on that which accepts it; and (iii) hold the alternative view that the larger the body interacting, the greater the force it exerts. Based on the above results, as well as in the ways in which they seem to be related, we developed hypotheses, potentially able to lead to the construction of a teaching–learning sequence, which focuses on the comprehension of force as the measure of a unified concept of interaction between two entities.     

Author Index

Authors Index

Author Index     

Transferring a Teaching Learning Sequence Between Two Different Educational Contexts: the Case of Greece and Finland

In the present paper, we report on the idea of exchanging educational innovations across European countries aiming to shed light on the following question: how feasible and useful is it to transfer an innovation across different national educational settings? The innovation, in this case, Inquiry-Based Teaching Learning Sequences, is recognized as a crucial component of renewal science teaching in European countries. Two local working groups from two different Universities, in Finland and Greece, were created consisting of researchers and experienced primary teachers. The transfer from Greece to Finland was rather challenging because of the differences between the two educational contexts. The initial, as well as the revised Teaching Learning Sequence, were implemented for 11–12-year-old students including the content to be taught, that is Floating-Sinking phenomena and density, and the learning environment aspects such as learning Control of Variables Strategy. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods was implemented in order to formulate concrete recommendations on feasible and useful aspect. The feasible aspect adduces answers to the query of “how” this transfer worked in practice. Concerning this aspect, the recognition of what is innovative for each national partner was recognized as a crucial factor for the design and revision of both Teaching Learning Sequences. The useful aspect illuminates students’ improvement in the achievement of conceptual as well as procedural knowledge. The results revealed that the psychological paths that bring about this success are ecumenical and independent of the history of the educational group.     

Educational software for improving learning aspects of Newton’s Third Law for student teachers

In this paper, we present the design, development, implementation and evaluation of educational software “Newton-3”, aiming at the learning of Newton’s Third Law by student-teachers who are not Physics majors. We describe the theoretical issues of our teaching approach and the various software tasks that we designed in order to promote students’ understanding. Specifically, the software is designed for the teaching of gravitational and electrostatic interactions between two distant bodies at rest. It is a web-based application and runs on a simple web browser with Macromedia Flash plug-in installed. The development of software and its integration into teaching–learning sequence is based on three main characteristics: the range of contexts in which the concept of force interaction applies, in the specification of the concept, and in an appropriate teaching learning environment (IDRF). We trialled the software on two groups of 8 primary school and 8 pre-school student-teachers, for 3 teaching periods, in the School of Education of our University. The research results indicate that the implementation was effective as the majority of the teacher-students improved their own knowledge concerning the existence and representation of gravitational and electrostatic interactions. An interesting result reveals that student-teachers have difficulty in perceiving the equality of magnitudes of action and reaction forces. This problem seems to be overcome after the teaching of the Inverse square law.