Respecting fluidity of student ideas : student-centered and enjoyable lessons about radioactivity

Author / Creator

PERC SM20 (2020)

Conferences

PERC SM20 Poster Session II (2020)

Available as

Online

Summary

Interviews with high school students in a city in Europe suggest that student naïve ideas about radioactivity can shift fluidly from one context to another. We encourage instructors to consider thi...

Interviews with high school students in a city in Europe suggest that student naïve ideas about radioactivity can shift fluidly from one context to another. We encourage instructors to consider this context-sensitivity when helping students learn about radioactivity. An example of instruction that has such consideration built into it is Yamamotos The Radiation Around Us, an instructional unit in HypothesisExperiment Class (HEC), the educational approach proposed by Itakura. HEC expects that individual students may simultaneously have multiple ways of thinking about a given situation, and several measures are put in place to support students in drawing on these various views. We will discuss how the Radiation Around Us respects and encourages simultaneous ideas from students (and hence fluidity of student reasoning). We will also present data from high school students suggesting that the intention of the curriculum to foster fluidity in student reasoning actually has an effect on students.

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