Abstracts - Earli

J 430 August 2007 17:00 - 18:20Room: 0.87 MarxPaper SessionConceptual changeChair:Mary Dawn Ainley, University of Melbourne, AustraliaWhat happens when they meet: pre service teachers’ discourse about a course assignmentDita Fischl, Kaye College, IsraelAbstract The study examines two continuous discourse events during a semester course in ateacher education college. The discourse is about the course assignment, a weekly tutoring of amentally challenged person by a pre-service teacher. The study aims to characterize theprofessional development of the course participants, by analyzing their discourse, implementingKagan’s (1992) professional development model. Primary findings, sampled from previous yeardiscourse, indicate at the beginning of the assignment concerns and personal difficulties, followedby knowledge acquisition, without use of external knowledge, such as recommended readings.These findings are primary and may hint to a process partly compatible to Kagan’s model thatclaims, experience contributes to knowledge acquisition and changes pre-service teachers’previous beliefs.Materialistic Thinking of Sound – A Quantitative StudyHaim Eshach, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, IsraelThe present research is a continuation of the qualitative research of Eshach and Schwartz (2006).The present research aims at sharpening and broadening their results by examining a largepopulation of students, allowing thereby a precise quantitative treatment of the subject. In thisway, we are in a better position to gauge how prevalent and consistent materialistic thinking isamong students. The Research is based on a true/false questionnaire, composed of 36 questions,each describing a situation or a phenomenon related to sound. The questionnaire was filled by atotal of 396 participants. The total average of correct answers throughout the different groups ofparticipants was 59%. Although teachers’ percentage of correct answers was statisticallysignificantly higher than the students, still, in average, only 73% of the questionnaire was filled outcorrectly by them. Many participants of this study also possessed the concept that sound changesits style of motion in different mediums, and that sound is a continuous phenomenon (e.g.spreading in a kind of an infinite form). This provides support to the conclusions of Eshach andSchwartz (2006) in several ways: First, it is clear that students and moreover, even teacherstudentsattribute materialistic characteristics to sound. However, sound is not perceived as a"regular" matter that entirely fit Reiner’s et al. categories, but rather as an entity that can changemechanism of propagation when travelling through different mediums and travels in kind of aninfinite form. In addition, it seems like the participants’ answers were not globally coherent, butrather local coherency was searched by the students in their answers. This article, which enrichesour understanding of students’ concepts of sound, especially in people’s materialistic thinking,may help physics teachers to channel students from their materialistic thinking to the acceptedscientific understanding of sound.– 539 –