ON THE FORMATION AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT -A CASE STUDY IN THE CONCEPT OF "BUOYANCY"-

Abstract

Up until now, there have been some fact-finding types of investigations on the concept of buoyancy. The purpose of this study is to clarify how the lower secondary school and university students understand and think scientifically about the buoyancy in the water and air. In addition, we examine how the students respond to the problems which they have not studied yet. It has been said that it is necessarily the case that those contents which have been newly learned constitute one's appropriate ways of thinking. We make investigations in this respect too. Furthermore, we explore how we should show the situation which presents cognitive conflicts so that the students can get clues as to what elements are necessary to develop the ability of metacognition. From our findings, we point out the following six factual points.(1) Impossibility of transferring the contents of learning.(2) Inappropriateness of introducing only the cognitive conflict situation to change the learners' ideas.(3) Necessity for explaining the contents for learning appropriately.(4) Importance of clarifying what kind of relation holds between knowledge and concepts.(5) Importance of learning many similar contents for learning.(6) Importance of developing a new teaching instrument to show the contents of experiments concretely.