Abstract
The particle view of matter is one of the core ideas of science that is involved in explaining myriad science phenomena. From early on, pupils explain everyday phenomena such as air pollution using their intuitive ideas and models of matter. However, research about primary school children’s ideas about air and air pollution is very limited. In this study, we focus on pupils’ ideas about clean and polluted air before and after they participated in a modelling-based teaching and learning sequence. We analyse multimodal productions from children ages 10 to 12 years old. The results show that most children are capable of thinking about air as a discrete substance without macroscopic differences when it is polluted. Nevertheless, they present strong difficulties in interpreting the nature of the different “particles” they identified in both clean and polluted air.
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Information about the project ParticipAire and the TLS is available at: https://ddd.uab.cat/record/225073?ln=ca
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Acknowledgement
This research was done in PhD Education programme at UAB and partially funded by Spanish Government (PGC2018-096581-B-C21), ACELEC group (2017SGR1399) and FECYT (FCT-17-11955). Tena was supported by AGAUR under FI programme.
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Tena, È., Couso, D. (2021). What Is City Air Made of? An Analysis of Pupils’ Conceptions of Clean and Polluted Air. In: Levrini, O., Tasquier, G., Amin, T.G., Branchetti, L., Levin, M. (eds) Engaging with Contemporary Challenges through Science Education Research. Contributions from Science Education Research, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74490-8_11
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