2011 Volume 51 Issue 3 Pages 75-83
In junior high school physics courses, it is essential to teach magnitude of force and the elongation of springs by allowing student to conduct an experiment, accurately represent its results graphically, and thus find a relationship between the magnitude of force and the elongation of springs. This study was intended to find, through a practice in which students were instructed to build up a hypothesis based on the four-question strategy (4QS) and conduct an experiment, the effects of teaching such hypothesis building on their graph-making capability. For that purpose, we assigned our students to an experimental group in which they built up a hypothesis based on 4QS and conducted an experiment to determine the relationship between the magnitude of force and the elongation of springs. We also allotted some to a control group in which students conducted an experiment after the whole class discussed and built up a hypothesis without using 4QS. Both groups were compared in the level of learning of their graph-making capability and the application of questions to test the capability. As a consequence, we found the following: First, the experimental group using 4QS showed a significantly higher percentage of students who successfully learned graph-making capability than did the control group. Second, for the application of questions to test their graph-making capability, the experimental group had a higher percentage of students who applied the 4QS strategy.
