Author:

Keywords:

scientific ideas, dialogue

Abstract:

Students come into the science classroom with, often erroneous, preconceptions of scientific concepts. These preconceptions serve the student well in explaining the world in everyday life, but they inhibit the learning of scientific concepts in the science class. Posner suggested that the shortcomings of the preconceptions must be shown, thus allowing the students to rationally make the step from the preconception to the scientific concept. Vosniadou and colleagues, and Mortimer and colleagues both continue on this idea with respectively a framework theory and a conceptual profile-theory. To stimulate conceptual understanding in the science classroom about concepts such as energy, we aim to continue the work of Vosniadou and Mortimer by combining Socratic dialogue with hands-on experimentation. An approach is presented with six distinct steps: waking up, identifying, and challenging the preconception are followed by introducing, securing and using the scientific concept.