From an early age, children develop ideas and personal theories to explain the world around them and how it works. Children’s ideas form the basis of their predictions and rules for action; for example, they quickly learn that a fire is hot and not to touch it. They learn that stones sink and wood floats. By the time children go to school, they have already formed their own theories about the science phenomena you are teaching them. Quite often, their ideas are different from the accepted scientific understanding.
This unit examines the alternative conceptions (sometimes referred to as misconceptions) associated with the topic of heat and temperature. It goes on to look at how you might help to develop your students’ alternative conceptions to embrace the accepted science ideas through your teaching.
Being aware of your students’ ideas and knowing how to develop them is important because:
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As a teacher, you need to have a good understanding of the topic you are teaching. You also need to be aware of what your students might find conceptually difficult and the potential areas of confusion. You can find out what ideas your students hold through various assessment techniques, such as concept mapping (see the unit Observing patterns: shadows and night & day), predict-observe-explain (see the unit Using demonstration: food), drawings and true/false quizzes.
Resource 1 is a true/false quiz about heat and temperature. Do this quiz yourself, without looking up any of the answers. When you have completed it, use reference material, such as the textbook, to check your answers to any questions you were not sure about.
Resources 2 and 3, ‘Assessing progress and performance’ and ‘Monitoring and giving feedback’, provide useful information about the value of finding out what your students know and challenging their thinking when it is confused. Giving supportive and helpful feedback will encourage your students to question their ideas more and want to explore their ideas further.
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At first, these questions seem relatively simple but it is not uncommon to feel unsure of some of the answers. Even though this was called a ‘quiz’ rather than a ‘test’ to make it less threatening, you may still have experienced some anxiety about your understanding being tested. The same feelings would be experienced by your students. Therefore, when you are probing your students’ understanding of any topic, it is important to put them at ease. They need to be reassured that they are not being tested. They need to know that you are interested in their ideas so that you can teach them more effectively.
Video: Assessing progress and performance |
Mr Mishra used prediction to find out what his Class VII students understood and believed about heat and temperature when liquids were mixed. Here he explains what he did and found out.
I decided to ask the students to predict what would happen when I mixed different volumes of water at different temperatures. I started by asking them what a thermometer does. Most knew it was used to measure the temperature, but a few students thought it measured heat. I just said that was interesting, rather than telling them the answer, because I wanted them to feel comfortable in revealing their ideas.
Next, I took two beakers of water of the same volume and temperature – the water was cold. I asked one student to read the temperature of each beaker to check they were the same. I asked the students to write down their prediction about what would happen to the temperature of the water when both beakers of water were mixed in one container. Would the temperature go down, go up or stay the same? I also asked them to predict the final temperature. Most of the students thought it would be the same, but some thought the temperature would go down because it was a bigger volume of water, which I hadn’t expected.
I followed the same procedure for different volumes and temperatures of water. I used:
It didn’t take long to do this activity, and what the students predicted and the reasons behind their predictions helped me to understand their current thinking. For example, two students thought ‘hot’ was stronger than ‘cold’. Although most predicted correctly whether the temperature would go up or down or stay the same, they were not so confident when predicting the temperature of the mixtures. Some students just subtracted one temperature from the other. Some added them up.
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The true/false quiz you did in Activity 1 is based on some of the alternative conceptions (sometimes referred to as misconceptions) about heat and temperature found by researchers. Some of the alternative conceptions held by children are as follows:
Pause for thought Go back to the list you made earlier about the experiences of heat and temperature that children are likely to have through their lives outside school.
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This is a science topic that children find difficult. These difficulties are partly due to the way in which the word ‘heat’ is used in everyday language. Millar (2000) pointed out that ‘heat’ is used both as a noun (e.g. the heat in an object) and as a verb (e.g. to heat an object). So the word ‘heat’ is used to describe the energy in a hot object as well as the process of energy transfer between two objects because of a difference in temperature (2000, p. 9). This highlights the need for you, as a teacher, to be careful with your use of language and to provide your students with the opportunity to explore the meanings behind the terms used.
Pause for thought Can you think of any other science topics where the scientific explanation is hard to grasp because it seems contrary to our everyday experience? |
You are now going to find out what ideas your students hold about heat and temperature.
You can either take the same approach as Mr Mishra or use the true/false quiz. Whichever approach you use, you will need to make sure that it is appropriate to the age of your students. For example, it would be inappropriate to find out what very young students know about thermometers.
A true/false quiz needs to have questions that will be understood, and the number of questions should be reduced for younger students. You could put the statements on the chalkboard and get the students to write their responses in their books or allow the students to tell you their ideas.
Before you start, tell the students that:
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After you find out what ideas your students hold, what can you as a science teacher do to change their alternative conceptions and help them to construct a more scientific understanding? In the next case study you will find out how one teacher approached her lesson.
Mrs Puthir’s students had learned how to use a thermometer and she carried out a true/false quiz. In this case study she talks of what she found out and the lesson she taught to change their ideas.
I teach a large class of 66 Class VI students. I had found out that many of them believed that the temperature of an object depended on what it is made of. I wanted to teach them about temperature and how all objects will be the same temperature as their surroundings. Also, I wanted to get them to understand why temperature changes.
I decided to get the children to measure the temperature of different substances. I had lots of examples, including cloth, fur, a tile, a metal spoon, a fruit, some soil, a wood block with a hole in it for the thermometer, a cup of hot tea, some water at room temperature and some very cold water.
I told the students to work in groups of six. I didn’t have enough equipment to give every group a full set. I was also worried about them knocking over the hot liquid. So I decided to put the substances around the classroom with a thermometer. I told the students that they had to send two from the group to measure the temperature of an object. Both had to take the temperature so they got two readings. This way, students got to practice using the thermometer, as well as confirming they had read it correctly. I drew a table on the blackboard (Table 1) for them to copy and complete.
Object of substance | Temperature 1 | Temperature 2 |
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I showed them how to do one reading and reminded them of how to read the scale on the thermometer. Each pair did two or three substances.
When they finished, we went through their results as a class. They had all found the same temperatures for most substances. I asked if any results had surprised them. Some students had thought fur and cloth would have higher temperatures than the tile and the metal spoon, which they said felt colder.
The only difference was with the hot water and cold water. The groups had recorded different temperatures. I asked why this was. Was the thermometer broken? They didn’t think so, and thought it was because the hot water was losing heat and the cold water was warming up. I asked what the temperature of both would be if we left them long enough. Their answers were interesting and diverse. From there, I explained how temperature measures the intensity of the heat in an object and how it is transferred until it is the same temperature as the surroundings.
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Once you have tried to develop your students’ ideas, you need to assess their understanding. You might use the same technique that you used to find out about their misconceptions, or give them new situations to which they can apply their new understanding.
Now read Case Study 3 and read Resource 2, ‘Assessing progress and performance’, especially the sections on assessment for learning and knowing where students are in their learning.
In this case study, Mr Mishra talks about the lesson he did after he had found out about the ideas his students held about heat and temperature, as described in Case Study 1.
The lesson involved students investigating changes in temperature when water at different temperatures is mixed in different volumes. I gave them some volumes to do, but said they could do others as well if they had time. I wrote the instructions on the chalkboard. The students had to complete a table of results. They recorded the volumes of the water and the starting temperature. They had to predict the resulting temperature and then record the actual temperature.
Once they had done this, I did a demonstration to explain what happens. I used a model to aid my explanation. I used a dye to represent heat. The intensity of the colour represented the temperature. I had several clear containers already prepared with different amounts of dye to represent water at different temperatures. I checked the students understood the model by asking them to tell me what order to put the containers in, going from coolest to hottest. Even the ‘cold’ beaker had some dye, although it was very pale. I then mixed different amounts of the different concentrations to show what happens when different volumes of water at different temperatures were mixed. Each time I asked the students for their predictions and gave them time to talk with their neighbour.
The students liked this and enjoyed making the predictions about what would happen to the colour. They seemed to find it easier to predict and didn’t make the same mistakes as they did before.
Once they had seen the demonstration, I asked them to discuss and explain the results from their practical investigation and predict what would happen in other situations I gave them. I could see that this activity had helped them to gain a better understanding of heat and temperature. It had changed their ideas about heat and temperature.
Mr Mishra’s model appeared to help his students understand heat and temperature. He made the abstract concept of temperature more concrete by replacing it with colour intensity. The students could see the resulting ‘temperature’. This helped them to gain a qualitative understanding, before going on to develop a quantitative understanding.
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When using analogies and models, you must be alert to the limitations and the possibility of reinforcing alternative conceptions. The dye model used by Mr Mishra might reinforce the idea that heat is a substance that flows. It is also limited by being a static representation. Whereas a hot liquid will cool, this is not shown by the dye model. The best way to deal with these limitations is to ask the students why the model is not a perfect one and what it does show. Also note that Mr Mishra did not add the dye to the water in front of the students, as this would have reinforced the idea that heat is a substance.
You are now going to teach your students in order to develop their understanding of the difference between heat and temperature. You should read Resource 4 before you start your plan as this will help you decide what to do. You need to plan for the activity following these steps, but before you start, read the key resource ‘Planning lessons’, which summarises the key stages in planning and offers insight into the importance of planning. You need to plan for the activity following these steps:
Most of your students will have alternative conceptions, beliefs or theories of their own in many of the science topics you teach. Therefore, you need to become aware of the ideas your students already hold about the science you are teaching by providing opportunities for them to reveal and discuss their ideas. This will reveal the issues for you to address as you plan your lessons.
Through this unit, you have explored the idea of alternative conceptions and examined examples of the ones held about heat and temperature. These alternative conceptions are not only confined to children. You will find many adults hold ideas that are different from the scientifically accepted ones. There are various ways in which you can find out what ideas your students hold, as traditional test questions often do not reveal the conceptual understanding of the students.
Changing your students’ alternative conceptions can be challenging, as they may be hard for the students to give up and change. One approach goes the heart of being a scientist and reflects how scientific knowledge and theories have developed over time. This is through gaining evidence and considering different explanations for observations. Therefore, teaching science in this way supports your students in becoming young scientists, as well as developing their scientific understanding.
Read each statement in Table R1.1 and decide whether you think it is true or false. If you are not sure, tick the ‘Not sure’ box.
Statement | True | False | Not sure | |
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1 | Heat is the total amount of energy in an object. | |||
2 | All objects contain heat. | |||
3 | Thermal energy means the same as heat. | |||
4 | Heat is a form of energy. | |||
5 | Temperature measures heat. | |||
6 | Temperature and heat are the same. | |||
7 | An iceberg has more heat than a cup of hot tea. | |||
8 | Heat is the energy transferred between objects because of a temperature difference between them. | |||
9 | ‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ are words that describe the temperature of an object. | |||
10 | ‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ are words that describe the amount of thermal energy an object has. | |||
11 | Heat is a substance, like air or water, that flows in and out of objects. | |||
12 | ‘Cold’ is the opposite of ‘heat’. | |||
13 | Only hot objects have heat. | |||
14 | There are different types of heat, such as natural heat and normal heat. | |||
15 | Some objects are colder than others because of what they are made from, e.g. such as floor tiles and metal. | |||
16 | When two cups of cold water of the same temperature are mixed, the water will be twice as cold. | |||
17 | Thermometers are used for measuring heat. | |||
18 | The temperature of iced water at 0 °C will go down when more ice is added. |
Assessing students’ learning has two purposes:
Formative assessment enhances learning because in order to learn, most students must:
As a teacher, you will get the best out of your students if you attend to the four points above in every lesson. Thus assessment can be undertaken before, during and after instruction:
When you decide what the students must learn in a lesson or series of lessons, you need to share this with them. Carefully distinguish what the students are expected to learn from what you are asking them to do. Ask an open question that gives you the chance to assess whether they have really understood. For example:
Give the students a few seconds to think before they answer, or perhaps ask the students to first discuss their answers in pairs or small groups. When they tell you their answer, you will know whether they understand what it is they have to learn.
In order to help your students improve, both you and they need to know the current state of their knowledge and understanding. Once you have shared the intended learning outcomes or goals, you could do the following:
Knowing where to start will mean that you can plan lessons that are relevant and constructive for your students. It is also important that your students are able to assess how well they are learning so that both you and they know what they need to learn next. Providing opportunities for your students to take charge of their own learning will help to make them life-long learners.
When you talk to students about their current progress, make sure that they find your feedback both useful and constructive. Do this by:
You will also need to provide opportunities for students to improve their learning. This means that you may have to modify your lesson plans to close the gap between where your students are now in their learning and where you wish them to be. In order to do this you might have to:
By slowing the pace of lessons down, very often you can actually speed up learning because you give students the time and confidence to think and understand what they need to do to improve. By letting students talk about their work among themselves, and reflect on where the gaps are and how they might close them, you are providing them with ways to assess themselves.
While teaching–learning is taking place and after setting a classwork or homework task, it is important to:
The four key states of assessment are discussed below.
Every student learns differently, at their own pace and style, both inside and outside the school. Therefore, you need to do two things while assessing students:
In all schools across India the most common form of recording is through the use of report card, but this may not allow you to record all aspects of a student’s learning or behaviours. There are some simple ways of doing this that you may like to consider, such as:
Once information and evidence have been collected and recorded, it is important to interpret it in order to form an understanding of how each student is learning and progressing. This requires careful reflection and analysis. You then need to act on your findings to improve learning, maybe through feedback to students or finding new resources, rearranging the groups, or repeating a learning point.
Assessment can help you to provide meaningful learning opportunities to every student by establishing specific and differentiated learning activities, giving attention to the students who need more help and challenging the students who are more advanced.
Improving students’ performance involves constantly monitoring and responding to them, so that they know what is expected of them and they get feedback after completing tasks. They can improve their performance through your constructive feedback.
Effective teachers monitor their students most of the time. Generally, most teachers monitor their students’ work by listening and observing what they do in class. Monitoring students’ progress is critical because it helps them to:
It will also help you as a teacher to decide:
Students improve most when they are given clear and prompt feedback on their progress. Using monitoring will enable you to give regular feedback, letting your students know how they are doing and what else they need to do to advance their learning.
One of the challenges you will face is helping students to set their own learning targets, also known as self-monitoring. Students, especially struggling ones, are not used to having ownership of their own learning. But you can help any student to set their own targets or goals for a project, plan out their work and set deadlines, and self- monitor their progress. Practising the process and mastering the skill of self-monitoring will serve them well in school and throughout their lives.
Most of the time, listening to and observing students is done naturally by teachers; it is a simple monitoring tool. For example, you may:
Make sure that the observations you collect are true evidence of student learning or progress. Only document what you can see, hear, justify or count.
As students work, move around the classroom in order to make brief observation notes. You can use a class list to record which students need more help, and also to note any emerging misunderstandings. You can use these observations and notes to give feedback to the whole class or prompt and encourage groups or individuals.
Feedback is information that you give to a student about how they have performed in relation to a stated goal or expected outcome. Effective feedback provides the student with:
When you give feedback to each student, it should help them to know:
It is important to remember that effective feedback helps students. You do not want to inhibit learning because your feedback is unclear or unfair. Effective feedback is:
Whether feedback is spoken or written in the students’ workbooks, it becomes more effective if it follows the guidelines given below.
When we are praised and encouraged, we generally feel a great deal better than when we are criticised or corrected. Reinforcement and positive language is motivating for the whole class and for individuals of all ages. Remember that praise must be specific and targeted on the work done rather than about the student themselves, otherwise it will not help the student progress. ‘Well done’ is non-specific, so it is better to say one of the following:
The dialogue that you have with your students helps their learning. If you tell them that an answer is incorrect and finish the dialogue there, you miss the opportunity to help them to keep thinking and trying for themselves. If you give students a hint or ask them a further question, you prompt them to think more deeply and encourage them to find answers and take responsibility for their own learning. For example, you can encourage a better answer or prompt a different angle on a problem by saying such things as:
It may be appropriate to encourage other students to help each other. You can do this by opening your questions to the rest of the class with such comments as:
Correcting students with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ might be appropriate to tasks such as spelling or number practice, but even here you can prompt students to look for emerging patterns in their answers, make connections with similar answers or open a discussion about why a certain answer is incorrect.
Self-correction and peer correction is effective and you can encourage this by asking students to check their own and each other’s work while doing tasks or assignments in pairs. It is best to focus on one aspect to correct at a time so that there is not too much confusing information.
Alternative misconceptions can be hard to change and can interfere with meaningful learning in science. What you need to do, therefore, is to teach in a way that will help your students to reconstruct their ‘faulty’ ideas and change their conceptual understanding. Sanger and Greenbowe (2000) described conceptual change as requiring the realignment, reorganisation and replacement of ‘existing misconceptions in order to accommodate new ideas’ (2000, p. 522).
Learning is not necessarily simply a case of adding new information to existing ideas and theories. The existing ideas may need dismantling and new ones built to replace them. This is particularly the case in science. Vosniadou et al. (2001) pointed out that scientific explanations of physical phenomena are often not intuitive and contrary to our everyday experience.
There is a great deal of research literature on how teachers can develop students’ scientific understanding and change their alternative conceptions. Simply giving them information through telling is known to be unsuccessful in many instances. The students’ alternative conceptions interfere with their learning of new ideas, and may lead to their rejection. Some of the key approaches you could use are listed below.
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