Influence that Organizing the Content Exerts on the Acquisition of Concepts

Abstract

Students in the third grade of junior high school learn about the mechanism of the battery under a national curriculum. The battery is a device that generates current by a chemical change. Junior high school students make batteries and observe the generation of the chemical change and the current. However, they do not learn the reason why the current is generated by the chemical change. In a word, they merely relate one phenomenon to another. Later, they learned that the current is a flow of free electrons, and they inquired about the generation of the current by the chemical change. As a result, they understood why a current is generated by the chemical change from using free electrons. They were then able to expand their knowledge of the battery concept.