Abstracts - Earli

Community of knowledge- a conference as a place for exposure and distribution of professionalknowledgeDvora Gesser, Kibbutzim College of Education, IsraelZipi Zelkovich, Kibbutzim College of Education, IsraelThis longitudinal study (2001-2005) examined the contribution of a two days conference to theprofessional knowledge of third and second year students of the elementary school department ofthe Kibbutzim College. At the conference, third-year students presented action researchesconducted by them as part of their training. A qualitative research method was employed to assessits impact on participants in the conference. The 3rd year students reported improvement in theirprofessional abilities, they see themselves as a source o; knowledge and they developed skills ofpaper presentation, proud of their research’s achievements and the ability of working as a teamUsing phenomenography combined with knowledge space theory to study students’ thinkingpatterns in defining an atomZoltán Tóth, University of Debrecen, HungaryLajos Ludányi, Berze-Nagy J. High School, HungaryResearch in science education during the last twenty years has shown students’ difficulties andmisconceptions about the concept of the atom. This study investigates how students describeatoms when they are presented with an open-ended question, and what hierarchy their responsescan be arranged in. 730 students (grade 7-11, age 12-17) from 17 Hungarian secondary schoolswere questioned. Students’ responses were analysed by phenomenography (Marton, 1986)similarly to those that were done in the case of 239 high school students (grade 9-12) in the USA(Unal and Zollman, 1999). Categories extracted from the students’ responses were (a) units ofmatter; (b) constituents of an atom; (c) model of an atom. The connection between these categorieswas determined by using knowledge space theory (Doignon and Falmagne, 1999). Results showthat generally the ‘model of an atom’ is built on the ‘constituents of an atom’, and the category‘units of matter’ is separated from the other two categories. However we found inverse connectionbetween categories ‘constituents of an atom’ and ‘model of an atom’ in grade 9 in Hungary and ingrade 10 in the USA. The probable explanation for this exception is that students learn a lot aboutthe models of an atom in grade 9 in Hungary, and they deduce the constituents of the atom fromthe model of the atom. In the case of Hungarian 11th graders we have not found any connectionamong the three categories mentioned above. This result shows that students’ knowledge structureregarding the concept of the atom disintegrates after finishing chemical studies at school. (Thiswork was supported by OTKA – T049379.)Development of intercultural competence in a blended-learning contextInge Herfort, Vienna University of Technology, AustriaThomas’ model of developing intercultural competence is discussed in the context of a blendedlearningmodule for students wanting to improve on their intercultural competence in businesssettings. Thomas describes intercultural competence as "the ability to recognize, appreciate andhonour the cultural influence on perception, judgment, emotion and behaviour within oneself andwith others and to apply this ability in a productive manner" (Thomas 2006:118). In this study ananswer is sought to the question if and how Thomas’ model can be applied to improvingintercultural business competence by doing qualitative interview research in the field of crossborderbusiness, by using e-learning tools and by combining these e-learning tools with periodicmeetings of these students in small discussion and reflexion groups. Theoretical basis of this– 227 –