We describe a pen and paper instrument designed to provide a measure of a range of student beliefs about thermal phenomena. The trial version, administered to 478 high school and university students aged 15–18 years, was able to distinguish belief changes in two populations, year 11 and first-year university physics students. We have used the revised instrument as a pre-test and post-test for evaluating students’ conceptual change following instruction. The instrument, called the Thermal Concept Evaluation, is appended.

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Conclusiones que en relación a la enseñanza del calor, nos llevan a afirmar que nos encontramos en medio del camino que nos presenta Lavoisier (1948).

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Interactive multimedia is promoted as an effective and stimulating medium for learning science, but students do not always interact with multimedia as intended by the designers. We discuss students’ interactions with an interactive multimedia program segment about projectile motion in the context of long jumping. Qualitative data were collected using a video camera and split-screen recorder to record each student’s image, voice, and student–program interactions. Left to themselves, students’ interactions were superficial, but when asked to explain their observations of projectile motion illustrations, they were observed to retain common intuitive conceptions. Only following researcher intervention did students develop an awareness of abstract aspects of the program. These results suggest that, despite interactivity and animated graphics, interactive multimedia may not produce the desired outcome for students learning introductory physics concepts.

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This paper discusses student and teacher perceptions of a new development in the use of the predict-observeexplain (POE) strategy. This development involves the incorporation of POE tasks into a multimedia computer program that uses real-life, digital video clips of difficult, expensive, time consuming or dangerous scenarios as stimuli for these tasks. The program was created by the first author to be used by pairs of secondary physics students to elicit their conceptions of force and motion and encourage discussion about these views. In this computer learning environment, students were required to type full sentence responses that were recorded by the computer for later analysis by the researcher. Other data sources for this study included audio and video recordings of student discussions, interviews with selected students and their teachers, classroom observations, and student questionnaires. This paper will report on some findings from the study, focussing on student and teacher perceptions of the computer-mediated POE tasks. The findings have implications for the effective use of multimedia to enhance meaningful learning in science classrooms.