Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a teaching strategy based on deductive inference, in which students design an experiment to prove the conservation of mass.
We used this strategy to teach four classes (123 students) of a fifth grade science unit (15 hours) about &ldquowater solution phenomena”, and analyzed the students' understanding of the scientific concept of conservation of mass regarding substances being dissolved in water.
The results show that students retained for three months the scientific concepts acquired by deductive learning with this strategy.
