Pre-concept Inquiry of "Matter State Changes" in Junior High School Science
Fenfen Zheng
School of Education, Zhejiang International Studies University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310023, P. R. China.
Yiping Zhang *
School of Education, Zhejiang International Studies University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310023, P. R. China.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The junior high school science course is a subject closely related to the reality of life, and before starting the formal learning of science concepts, students have formed many pre-concepts, which play a very important role in the formation of science concepts. In junior high school science teaching, it is necessary to explore students' relevant pre-concepts and the reasons for their formation, so that appropriate transformation strategies can be adopted to enable students to deeply understand science concepts, which is conducive to improving the effectiveness of science teaching. In this paper, a questionnaire survey was conducted to understand the pre-concepts embedded in students' minds before they learn the content related to matter state changes in junior high school science, and the reasons for the formation of erroneous pre-concepts were analyzed. In general, the formation of students' pre-concepts first comes from their own life experience and intuitive feelings, and is preceded by common sense of life. Second, through their own intuitive reasoning, they make wrong speculations about nouns. By identifying students' existing correct and wrong pre-concepts, it provides a basis for transforming vague and wrong pre-concepts in students' minds into science concepts in the subsequent teaching design.
Keywords: pre-concept, junior high school science, matter state changes, questionnaires