Department of Biology Education, University of Kiel, 24118 Kiel, Germany.
Department of Educational Research, Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN), University of Kiel, 24118 Kiel, Germany.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2018 Spring;17(1). doi: 10.1187/cbe.17-07-0133.
Energy is an important concept in all natural sciences, and a challenging one for school science education. Students' conceptual knowledge of energy is often low, and they entertain misconceptions. Educational research in science and mathematics suggests that learning through depictive representations and learning from errors, based on the theory of negative knowledge, can potentially foster students' knowledge of abstract concepts such as energy. Thus, we propose here an instructional approach that combines these two strategies to foster conceptual knowledge of energy. It involves inserting an error in a biological energy flow diagram, an error that we derived from two prevalent misconceptions about energy: 1) plants get some of their energy from the soil or 2) energy cycles in an ecosystem. The approach's effect on students' conceptual knowledge of energy was tested in an intervention study with pre-post design and 304 ninth grade students (M = 14.79 years). Students who successfully identified and explained the error achieved larger gains in conceptual knowledge than students learning with a correct diagram. Thus, the proposed instructional approach holds promise for improving energy teaching.
能量是所有自然科学中的一个重要概念，也是学校科学教育的一个具有挑战性的概念。学生对能量的概念知识往往较低，并且存在误解。科学和数学教育研究表明，基于负向知识理论，通过描绘性表示和从错误中学习，可以潜在地促进学生对抽象概念（如能量）的知识。因此，我们在这里提出了一种教学方法，将这两种策略结合起来，以促进对能量的概念理解。它涉及在生物能量流动图中插入一个错误，这个错误源自两个普遍存在的关于能量的误解：1）植物从土壤中获得部分能量；2）生态系统中的能量循环。该方法对 304 名九年级学生（M = 14.79 岁）进行了前后设计的干预研究，测试了其对学生能量概念知识的影响。成功识别和解释错误的学生在概念知识方面的收获比学习正确图表的学生更大。因此，所提出的教学方法有望改善能量教学。
