Twenty-fifth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

One of the most important challenges faced in science teaching is students’ pre-existing conceptions about the concepts and phenomena they are taught. These conceptions typically diverge from school science and should be taken into consideration by science teachers when negotiating the construction of scientific knowledge in the classroom. Analogies are a particularly powerful tool for science teaching, since they allow comparison and mapping between different knowledge domains: the source (a domain familiar to the learner) and the target (the domain to be taught and understood by the learner), thus supporting the construction of new knowledge. This study proposes an introductory chemistry teaching sequence about the concepts of chemical element and chemical compound by means of multiple analogies, designed so as to take into account students’ alternative conceptions. An experimental design involving two groups of 8th grade students attending a public secondary school in Greece was implemented. Results indicate that the participants in the Experimental Group achieved significantly higher scores in the post-test than their counterparts in the Control Group. Their responses reflected a significant improvement in their understanding of critical aspects of the taught concepts, concerning the distinction between element and compound as well as between compound and mixture. Moreover, they exhibited a better understanding of a variety of characteristic properties of matter. Implications for teaching of fundamental chemistry concepts with the use of multiple analogies are discussed.