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.
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