www.chitraltimes.com

HOW CAN WE ENHANCE STUDENTS’ CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS?

From the moment of birth infants begin to generate views about their new environment and construct sets of ideas, expectations, and explanations regarding how and why things behave as they do. These ideas and explanations, which children generate form a complex framework for thinking about the world, are frequently different from accepted scientific view. In literature, these differing frameworks are referred to as misconceptions, alternative conceptions, children ideas, preconceptions or alternative frameworks (Osborne, Bell & Gilbert, 1983).

This is generally accepted that due to children’s alternative concepts, teaching and learning of science is challenging, because the concepts, which children have about phenomena in every day life, are different from the concepts, which they are taught in science class room. For example, many children and perhaps some adults have alternative concept that human beings are not animal. The reason for this could be due the fact that in our social life, both the terms have different meanings ( Janwar, Insan). These every day life concepts (alternative concepts) do not allow the children to gain conceptual understanding of the scientific concepts (Leach & Scott, 2000). Moreover, alternative concepts are so resistant to change that even trained teachers with thorough planning may some times not be able to address them successfully (Taber, 2001).

To help the science teachers in addressing alternative concepts, the educational researchers have focused to develop instructional strategies which directly address those concepts. According to constructivist view of learning science, science teachers have to be very clear that students have their own ideas and explanations for almost every concept in science, and these ideas may not be coherent with accepted scientific views. So, before teaching any new concept, the teachers have to find out students existing concepts in the topic area and then provide learning opportunities to have interaction between students’ new and pre existing knowledge so that the new learning would be meaningful to the learners (Naylor, 1999). For this propose, students should be given time to identify and articulate their preconceptions; investigate the soundness and utility of their own ideas and those of others, including scientists; and, reflect on them and see the differences in those ideas. If students are going to change their alternative concepts, they must become dissatisfied with their existing conditions. The scientific conception must be intelligible and plausible for the students and it must be useful for them in a variety of new situations (Trumper 1997). This could be done by giving the students hands-on and minds-on activities in groups where they would confront their own perception, make prediction and test their predictions through observations, experiments and debate so that they would see the usefulness of their own conceptions and feel the need to change them (Driver, 1993 & Shah, 1999).
The complexity of addressing students’ alternative concepts in science, demands sound content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. Without rigorous professional development of science teachers, addressing students’ alternative concepts is hard. Teacher educators and policy makers therefore, need to re-think about traditional ways of teacher development programs with the new paradigm shift that students are not “empty vessels or plank slates”.

Sharif Panah
student of M.Ed
AgaKhan Uiversity- IED Karachi