This article describes the development and field test of the Sound Concept Inventory Instrument (SCII), designed to measure middle school students' concepts of sound. The instrument was designed based on known students' difficulties in understanding sound and the history of science related to sound and focuses on two main aspects of sound: sound has material properties, and sound has process properties. The final SCII consists of 71 statements that respondents rate as either true or false and also indicate their confidence on a five-point scale. Administration to 355 middle school students resulted in a Cronbach alpha of 0.906, suggesting a high reliability. In addition, the average percentage of students' answers to statements that associate sound with material properties is significantly higher than the average percentage of statements associating sound with process properties (p < 0.001). The SCII is a valid and reliable tool that can be used to determine students' conceptions of sound.
Many medical schools today are questioning whether they should implement a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. Educators have raised serious questions regarding the efficiency of PBL and therefore recommend learning more about the cognitive processes developed by PBL before implementing it broadly. In addition, it is important to determine whether PBL best matches the human reasoning process. The authors' theoretical discussion examines the relationship between the case-based reasoning (CBR) model and the PBL model. CBR indicates that the knowledge source one uses while solving a new problem includes not only generalized rules or general cases, but often a memory of stored cases recording specific prior episodes. CBR enables the reasoner to recommend solutions to problems quickly and to propose solutions in domains that are not completely understood, such as medicine. The authors' analysis reveals a strong association between the CBR and PBL models, and thus it can be argued that PBL is a successful teaching method that should be encouraged by medical schools.
The aim of the current research is to characterize the conceptual flow processes occurring in whole-class dialogic discussions with a high level of interanimation; in the present case, of a highschool class learning about image creation on plane mirrors. Using detailed chains of interaction and conceptual flow discourse maps-both developed for the purpose of this research-the classroom discourse, audio-taped and transcribed verbatim, was analyzed and three discussion structures were revealed: accumulation around budding foci concepts, zigzag between foci concepts, and concept tower. These structures as well as two additional factors, suggest the TwoSpace Model of the whole class discussion proposed in the present article. The two additional factors are: (1) the teacher intervention; and (2) the conceptual barriers observed among the students, namely, materialistic thinking, and the tendency to attribute "unique characteristics" to optical devices. This model might help teachers to prepare and conduct efficient whole-class discussions which accord with the social constructivist perspective of learning.
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.