Chinese Journal of Science Education

Abstract

For the past two decades, a growing amount of research has shown that the use of analogies and multiple analogies in science teaching and learning promotes meaningful understanding of complex scientific concepts (Spiro, Feltovich, Coulson, & Anderson, 1989; Glynn, 1989; Duit, 1991; Venville & Treagust, 1996; Chiu & Lin, 2002; 2005). However, researchers can’t get a common view of how analogies promote conceptual change. Dager (1994) supposed the main reason is that the examining of analogies locks the definitions of conceptual change’s levels and eyeshot. Based on their arguments, this research designed multiple analogies of electric current, selected 32 middle achievement 4th grade students, and randomly assigned them to a control group, a single analogy group, a similar analogies group and a complementary analogies group. The researchers hoped to investigate the role of analogies in pupils’ electric current understanding, and find its position in conceptual change. The results of this study show that multiple analogies are helpful to the learning of electricity concepts, and the comparisons of conceptual change via predicates analysis also indicate that complementary analogies can help pupils shift their electricity concepts from a MATTER to a PROCESS ontology. Besides, materialistic analogies are not a barrier to conceptual change; the intrinsic factor is the presupposition that students treat electric current as matter. To the contrary, when we design analogies, we should consider the nature and presupposition of the concepts we want to teach. These then, will be helpful to supply concrete representations to help students become aware of the difference between self-concepts and scientific concepts. It this happens, conceptual change will take place.

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