Chinese Journal of Science Education


Vol. 15 No. 3 , Pages 295 - 316 , 2007

A Study of Conceptual Change Teaching Activities for the Lesson of Cell Curriculum in Junior High School (Article written in Chinese)

Chow-Chin LU & Li-Yen HUANG

Abstract

To develop the conceptual change teaching activities, firstly, this study analyzed the types of alternative conceptions of the lesson of cell, and then applied the following teaching strategies to curriculum design, the conceptual change model, the 5E constructive learning cycle, matches analogy teaching, concept mapping and laboratory experiment. The quasi-experimental method was employed in this study to explore the effect of curriculum design. The results uncovered that the conceptions of experimental group students were better than that of the control group students, and furthermore it revealed the significant difference between these two groups. The conceptual change teaching activities could apparently promote the experimental group students’ learning outcome, and the scores of TIWM and CCAT in the middle and low score-group of experimental group were higher by 0.51 SD and 0.39 SD, especially. For example, in the lesson of “leaf’s level”, to demonstrate the effect of teaching activities, students actively engaged their learning on observing the cross section specimen of the banyan tree leaf, to think and to discuss together, then followed by mapping conception, and the activities were truly caused students’ cognitive conflict, and resulting in the conceptual clarification on their confused conceptions. However, the learning outcome of 5E constructive learning activities for the difficult concepts and those concepts involving the cross ontological conceptual change, such as the concepts of “the physiological phenomenon of cell membrane”, was limited on the explicit representation of osmosis only, not on the abstract and the real principle. This study proposed the following suggestions. Regarding the conducive effects of the teaching activities in this study, the teaching methods used by case teacher’s explanation could be served as the base of curriculum design, for example, the analogy teaching for the cell structure and function, and the concept mapping in the leaf composition and so on. For the more difficult and abstract concepts, such as “physiological phenomenon of the cell membrane”, this study suggested the way of setting these concepts into the chemistry lessons together, density and osmotic pressure.

Keywords: 5E constructive learning cycle; cell lesson; conceptual change teaching activities

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