Research Information System
NARST, Oregon, United States Of America, 15 - 18 March 2020, pp.106-108, (Full Text)
The purpose of the study was to investigate how preservice teachers use
multiple levels of representations to explain and teach physical and
chemical changes in science classrooms. Research questions were designed
as follows: (a) How do preservice teachers understand physical and
chemical change? (b) How do they teach physical and chemical change in grade
6-8? A qualitative research method was adopted in the study. Participants were
forty two preservice science teachers. Data were collected from open-ended
questionnaires and lesson plans. Data collection took four weeks.
Firstly, participants were asked to explain and draw their understanding after
watching four videos related to physical change and chemical change at the
macroscopic level. Secondly, they were asked to prepare lesson plans for
teaching physical and chemical change. Findings indicated that
participants had more scientific representations of physical change than those
of chemical change. Most of the participants had difficulty to explain dissolving
salt in water (19%) and sublimation of dry ice (28%) while
they had more scientific representations related to dissolving sugar
and ink in water. A majority of the participants did not have
scientific representations of chemical changes. An analysis of lesson plans
indicated that participants did not integrate multiple levels of
representations to teach physical and chemical changes in their classrooms.