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Drops of water and of soap solution: Students' constraining mental models of the nature of matter
Author(s) -
Eilam Billie
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal of research in science teaching
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.067
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1098-2736
pISSN - 0022-4308
DOI - 10.1002/tea.20034
Subject(s) - phenomenon , psychology , mathematics education , science education , scientific literacy , epistemology , philosophy
This study investigates how 25 junior high school students employed their bodies of knowledge and responded to problem cues while individually performing a science experiment and reasoning about a drops phenomenon. Line‐by‐line content analysis conducted on students' written ad hoc explanations aimed to reveal students' concepts and their relations within their explanations, and to construe students' mental models for the science phenomenon based on level of specification, models' correspondence with scientific claims, macro versus micro view of matter, and type of evidence used. We then inferred four types of knowledge representations for the nature of matter. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for science teaching. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 970–993, 2004