New Perspectives in Science Education

This cross age study was an exploration of students’ self-generated analogies in an attempt to predict novel situations. For the completion of the research aim mixed methods were employed. Group interviews were conducted in combination with the administration of a 6 item questionnaire.The purpose was to investigate the way students perceive and predict novel situations using pre-existing analogies.

In order to meet the needs of the study one age-group from each level of the Greek education system were recruited. Thirteen, sixteen and twelve students participated from Year 4 (primary education), Year 9 (secondary education, Greek ‘Gimnasium’) and Year 11 (secondary education, Greek ‘Lyceum’) respectively.

Students’ responses were analysed to ascertain whether students’ predictions could be viewed and understood as being a way of explaining that involves the generation of analogies. The aim was to see if students of different ages drew on the same analogies when faced with the same novel situation.

It emerged that there were many similarities among students’ predictions. For these predictions subjects generated a total of 21explanations using existing analogies. The findings indicate that connecting analogies to novel situations was important in the construction of predictions. The children in Years 4 and 9 expressed similar, and in many cases identical, predictions using the same analogies. Whilst students in Year 11 did make use of those same, similar, analogies the frequency  with which they drew on analogies to make predictions appeared much less that for the two younger groups..

These results indicate that instruction should help students to use analogies deriving from phenomena they observe at a very young age with concepts they are taught in order to make sense of abstract scientific knowledge.