2015 Volume 56 Issue 2 Pages 203-211
This study is a practical study to teach changes in the states of matter by the particle concept at a junior high school. The concept map was applied for conceptual understanding in this study.
First of all, changes in the states of matter was shown as a simple concept map constructed from three conceptual labels of solid, liquid and gas. As this map corresponds with the students’ experience, it is called an “experience-level map”. Then, each label for solid, liquid and gas was decompressed as three sub-maps, showing the internal structure and movement of the particle for each state. After the experiment, these three sub-maps were connected to each other with new linking words in agreement with the students, and shown as a “theoretical-level map”. Finally, the whole concept map was constructed as a combined map of the experience and theoretical levels. The commitment toward the particle concept by a certain amount of the students decreased after the experiment because the observed phenomena were much different from the particle movement. However, their commitment toward the concept of particle movement got stronger when the whole map was constructed. The students could make sense of the whole map. This showed that the commitment toward the theoretical system depended on the reasonability of the theoretical explanation rather than the experiment. In this study, the students could understand the explanation of the particle concept on the whole map. As the experience-level map was the mirror image of the students’ experience, they could judge the particle concept on the theoretical-level map through the experience-level map.
As a result, most students obtained the pragmatic understanding that scientific knowledge is a convenient tool for interpreting nature, and also got the holistic understanding that individual knowledge does not necessarily reflect on their experience, but they could understand the network of the knowledge as a system of explanation by using the concept map at the end of the learning unit.
