Assessing Junior High Students' Understanding of Density and Solubility

Similar Density Questions with Very Different Results

“…Many studies [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] have documented difficulty with density at a variety of ages, and a few of those [2][3][4][5][6][7] support our observation that the difficulty persists into college.…”

Effect of conceptual change approach accompanied with concept mapping on understanding of solution concepts

“…The questions required students to make a conceptual prediction about a situation in which there was a possibility to choose a wrong answer based on the misconceptions of students. The questions in the test were developed from the literature related to students' misconceptions with respect to solutions (Gennaro 1981;Prieto et al, 1989;Lee et al, 1993;Abraham et al, 1994;Ebenezer and Erickson 1996) and the set of pilot interviews with some classroom teachers to determine their observations about topics in which students had difficulty, and about examination results and students' misconceptions. Thus, the test reflected not only students' misconceptions but also fundamental concepts to be learned and points in which students had difficulty in comprehending.…”

Exploring Student Difficulties with Buoyancy

“…Other students may base this conclusion explicitly on a mass dependence of the volume of fluid displaced (VFD) on the object's mass (V mass) [3,6,[9][10][11][12]17] or density (density) [11][12]17].…”

“…We interviewed eight students at the end of the fall, 2010 semester, and we have analyzed longanswer explanations given by students taking drafts of our assessment. Distractors for our questions are based on conceptions identified by these methods, and by other studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Since few of those studies [1][2][3][4][5] involve students above the age of 15, 1 we wondered which difficulties identified in those studies would persist into college.…”