Role-Playing as an Activity to Work on Students' Perceptions of Nuclear Energy and Risks
The consumption of non-renewable energy and the energy crisis can be treated as a socio-scientific issue due to the ever-increasing demand for energy and the likely depletion of non-renewable fuels. Society must keep abreast of these issues, and preservice elementary science teachers (PESTs) in particular have to make an extra effort to understand and fix misconceptions about nuclear energy and balance its advantages and disadvantages as a source of energy. Some studies have highlighted numerous misconceptions of preservice students as regards their understanding of nuclear energy and its risks, whereas others have focussed on high school students and their perceptions. This paper presents a role-playing activity as part of a training programme in argumentation to reflect and raise awareness about the consumption of nuclear energy. A pre-test and a post-test were used to analyse the understanding and perception of nuclear energy of PESTs before and after the activity. The findings show that PESTs learn the basic concepts of nuclear energy by searching for evidence in order to be able to put forward good and reasoned arguments. One of the reasons for this was the need to defend their role's point of view about the acceptance or rejection of this energy source. This activity was performed without the participation of the teacher.
Keywords: Role-playing, pre-service, nuclear energy, perceptions, argumentation;
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