New Perspectives in Science Education

Since the mid-1970s a large body of research in science education has focused on identifying students’ ideas and difficulties in understanding science across a wide student age range. Whilst this research has informed the design of instructional approaches and curriculum development, it has contributed little to our understanding of how students reason when presented with a novel situation and the knowledge they draw upon to understand that situation. Currently there are two main perspectives on the nature of students’ knowledge: that of misconceptions and that of knowledge in pieces (p-prims). From the former perspective students’ knowledge is perceived as being theory-like and stable with students’ ideas being context-independent whereas the latter perspective sees students’ knowledge as composed of smaller, loosely organized, elements with their activation and subsequent arrangement into ‘strings’ being dependent upon the context of the situation students are trying to understand.

In this cross age study, conducted in Greece, students (n=166) aged 10 to 17 years were asked to make predictions about novel situations and then explain how they arrived at those predictions. We report here on a number of ideas identified in students’ explanations by considering how they can be seen either as misconceptions or, alternatively, as situated acts of construction involving the activation and arrangement of smaller p-prims. Although our purpose was not to judge the merits of one perspective over the other, we were better able to understand and interpret the ideas identified in students’ explanations in terms of p-prims already documented in the literature. Our results showed that students’ ideas were not theoretically grounded but rather appeared to be composed of independent ‘pieces of knowledge’ strung together in response to the contextual features of the novel situation they were presented with. Further research is now needed to better understand the nature of students’ knowledge and reasoning and how these could be directly linked to teaching approaches.