This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the obstacles preventing them from constructing a useful explanatory model. Our findings indicate that several of the children were able to construct explanatory models. However, of the six children interviewed multiple times (three third-graders and three sixth-graders), only one was consistently able to critique and revise her models to arrive at a consistent, coherent, and sophisticated explanatory model. Connecting intuitive knowledge and abstract knowledge was important in her construction of a coherent and sophisticated explanatory model. Students who relied only on intuitive knowledge constructed tentative and nonsophisticated explanatory models. Students who relied only on verbal-symbolic knowledge at an abstract level without connection with their intuition also did not construct coherent and sophisticated models. These results indicate that instruction should help students to become metaconceptually aware and connect their verbal-symbolic knowledge and intuition in order to construct explanatory models to make sense of abstract scientific knowledge.
Student construction of models is a strong focus of current research and practice in science education. In order to study in detail the interactions between students' model generation and evaluation and their development of explanatory ideas to account for magnetic phenomena, a multi-session teaching experiment was conducted with a small number of fifth grade students. Two small groups received full scaffolding, and two small groups received partial scaffolding. Students in both fully and partially scaffolded groups were asked to make their own predictions, observations, and explanations for scientific phenomena. Then they were asked to elaborate individual ideas and discuss with others in order to select or develop the best group consensus model and to compare their current group model with their previous group models. Only fully scaffolded groups were explicitly asked to consider the scientific modeling criteria of visualization and explanatory power. Through reflection on their explanations using these modeling criteria, most students in the fully scaffolded groups gradually developed, evaluated, and revised their explanations to coherent and sophisticated explanatory models. By contrast, none of the students in the partially scaffolded groups, who relied only on self-generated model evaluation criteria, revised their original fragmented ideas toward more coherent and sophisticated explanations. Through a detailed analysis of the evolution of the students' thinking in both fully and partially scaffolded groups, we explore the ways in which the explicit scaffolding of the scientific modeling criteria seemed to aid in the evolution of their ideas toward more sophisticated and coherent explanatory models. #
Anastrozole has a high pregnancy rate, although it induces fewer ovulatory follicles compared with clomiphene citrate. The two drugs gave different responses of FSH, LH and E2 during stimulation cycles.
The purpose of this study was to investigate how learning materials based on Science Magic activities affect student attitudes to science. A quasi-experimental design was conducted to explore the combination of Science Magic with the 5E Instructional Model to develop learning materials for teaching a science unit about friction. The participants were recruited from among the students of a middle school in central Taiwan. Based on our results, we conclude that our combined teaching method involving Science Magic activities and the 5E Instructional Model is effective for developing learning materials for teaching, and that this method improves students' attitudes toward science.
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