Developmental Change of Student's Cognition About the Motion of Pendulums and ITS Effects on School Science

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the developmental change of understanding and cognition about pendulum motion and its effects on school science. The subjects were 659 people ranging from kindergartners up to graduate students, Kindergartners weve interviewed, and other subiects were asked to fill out multiple-choice questionnaires.The results were as follows: (1) Even the kindergartners have already developed their ideas about some aspects of the motion of pendulums. These ideas, mostly non-scientific, make a marked developmental change by the time they reach K4. (2) The scientific ideas of pendulum motion become predominant presumably due to the educational intervention in school science as evidenced in the subject groups from K6 to sciencerelated graduate students. There is a difference, however, in the effects on school science between the conceptions of speed and period: students show higher performance in the latter. Formal instructions of pendulum motion start at K5. (3) The effects of educational intervention in school science on the student's cognition of pendulum motion are evident among the subjects from K6 to graduate school. The data obtained in this study strongly suggest that although most of their students apply scientifically accepted answer to the period, their views on pendulum motion are non-scientific. In the final section, the implications of these results for science education are briefly discussed.