Misconceptions

It’s difficult to measure the student’s conceptual change from the bubble experiment because one, we did not know the students before hand and we did not know what they had been taught in their classes and two, because the students had never heard of surface tension before. When we asked the students what they thought it meant, all we got were blank stares. They had never heard of the term surface tension, we even had difficulty getting the students to understand what a surface was, and they just did not get what tension was in terms of emotions or in scientific terms. However, even if the students had known what surface tension was, I doubt they would have learned much from the bubbles activity and their misconceptions would probably still be intact because of how advance this experiment was and our lack of content knowledge.

As far as conceptual change that I have seen during science in my classroom, there is not a lot of time spent on science. They have science every other day and they are currently just taking notes on different types of forests. Based off of other subjects that I have observed it seems that the students are fairly willing to accept changes to their original beliefs when presented with facts. Another thing that I have noticed in the class that makes me believe the students are very accepting of changes is the way that the students take notes during their science and social studies lessons. They make a person KWL chart almost and then as a class they create a larger KWL class chart – most of the time sometimes they just talk as a class. The students are first asked to write down what they know about the topic on the left side of their paper and then the class creates a combined list (like they would for the “K” portion of a KWL chart) and then they write down any questions that they have about the topic on the right side of the paper and then share that part as a class (like they would for the “W” portion of the chart). At the end of the lesson, at the bottom of their paper, they write down a summary of the reading and any questions that they still have about the subject and then as a class they try and answer most of the questions. As a class, they then go through the facts that they had come up with at the beginning and see if they as a whole believe that these “facts” are still true. Many of the students that offered the “facts” at the beginning of the lesson correct their own statements before other students can.