Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore students’ conceptual formation and development about dissolving. The subjects are 6th graders, second-year junior high school students, and second-year high school students. The research methods included POE (Predict-Observe-Explain) (to 3 classes of students from each different grade, IAI (Interview About Instance) (10 students from each different grade), and cross examination with previous studies (Hsu and Pon, 2002). It was discovered that students judge whether or not a substance dissolves in water by determining if the substance is oil, when glycerin, normally unfamiliar to students, was tested. Students with higher education levels tend to base their judgments on school experience. For cornstarch, which is regularly seen in daily life, students tend to make their judgments based on life experiences rather than school experiences. During the formation of misconception, students tend to overgeneralize the relationships of “oil, density, and dissolving” and “all acid can be dissolved in water”. This research was based on Piaget & Garcia (1989)’s model of the development for science theory, and concluded the features of students’ conceptual development for dissolving as being: Students of lower years tend to judge the solvency of a substance based on its appearance and features. But as school experience increases, students gradually formed concepts for density, and have a higher tendency for determining solvency based on this concept. Even after students formed concepts of acids and chemical formulas in high school, it appeared that both concepts still co-exist in a student’s cognitive structure.
| Keywords: | conceptual development; conceptual formulation; dissolving; misconception |
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