Abstract
A troubleshooting activity was carried out by an e-tutor in two steps. First, students diagnosed a mistaken statement and then compared their diagnosis to a teacher’s diagnosis provided by the e-tutor. The mistaken statement involved a widespread tendency to over-generalize Ohm’s law. We studied the discourse between pairs of students working with the e-tutor to examine whether and how the activity attained its objective of engaging students in knowledge integration processes; namely to elicit students’ ideas, add scientifically acceptable or non-acceptable ideas and support them in developing criteria to sort out their ideas. We focus here on two case studies involving a pair of students with high prior knowledge and a pair with poor prior knowledge. The micro-analysis of these two pairs shows how the activity triggered students to explicate multiple alternative interpretations of the principles and concepts involved and attempts to align conflicting conceptions. We discuss how successive emendations gradually culminated in the elaboration of the students’ understanding of these concepts.
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Notes
See cover , Phys. Today 36 9 1983.
LON-CAPA, see http://www.lon-capa.org.
WebAssign, see http://www.webassign.net.
Similar activities were developed that elicited a variety of alternative interpretation of concepts and principles in the domain of electromagnetism that are known from the research literature to be widespread among students.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the teachers who participated in this study, Mrs. Edith Schveiger, Mrs. Michal Walter and Mr. David Cassel, for their valuable cooperation and help in this study. We thank Mrs. Corina Polingher for her help in developing the mistaken statement and “teacher’s” diagnosis. We appreciate the support of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Department of Science Teaching.
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Yerushalmi, E., Puterkovsky, M. & Bagno, E. Knowledge Integration While Interacting with an Online Troubleshooting Activity. J Sci Educ Technol 22, 463–474 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-012-9406-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-012-9406-8