The floating and sinking phenomenon related to buoyant force can readily be observed in everyday life and easily demonstrated to young students. However, many students believe that the buoyant force is determined by the object’s attributes, such as the shape (e.g., ship) or material (e.g., wood). As a result, students find it challenging to understand that buoyant force changes when different volumes of the same object are submerged in water, or when the same object is submerged in different fluids. In response to the question concerning whether the weight of a cup changes when a tea bag is placed in a cup of water, 63.3% of first-year university students who majored in physics or chemistry were wrong. The problems related to buoyant force are difficult to understand even for college students, so the topic is used in the selection process for gifted students. Although numerous educational attempts have been made to help students understand the concept, buoyant force is still a difficult concept for them. Thus, an easy and clear approach to help students understand the buoyant force is desirable.
In this study, we developed a model for analyzing scientists' creative thinking processes, and analyzed Archimedes' thinking process in solving the golden crown problem. As results show, scientists' complex problem solving processes could be represented as a repeating circular model, and the fusion of processes of diverse thinking required for scientists' creativity could be analyzed from the case. Also in this study, we represented the role of experiments in scientists' creative discovery, and investigated the reasons for the difference between the viewpoints of textbooks and historic facts. We found the importance of abductive reasoning and advance knowledge in creative thinking. Archimedes solved the golden crown problem creatively by crossing the scientific thought of dynamics and the daily thought of baths. In this process, abductive reasoning and advance knowledge played an important role. Besides Archimedes' case, if we would reconstruct the creative discovery processes of diverse scientists' in textbooks, students could raise their creative thinking ability by experiencing these processes as educational steps.
The purposes of this study were to analyze instructional strategies of science teachers, science teachers' orientations toward science teaching by the reason which instructional strategies was used in middle school science classes, and the relations among PCK elements for suggesting a direction of improvement of PKC models. For this purpose, we selected three of middle school teachers as participants who had various teaching experience periods. Semi-structured interviews and classroom observations were gathered for data. From the data collected, we analyzed the type of instructional strategies of science teachers. On the base of these, we identified characteristics of the teachers' orientations toward teaching science. From the reason that instructional strategies was used, we could ascertain that knowledge of science curriculum and knowledge of students' learning which was component of PCK crucially affected instructional strategies of science teachers. Therefore we assured that analysis of practical instructional strategies of science teachers that showed through science instruction was the most effective method that could find out science teacher's orientation of teaching science internalized, and that knowledge of science curriculum and knowledge of students' learning was the basic component of PCK that formed instructional strategies of science teachers. On the basis of the result, a necessity for improvement of PCK models was presented.
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