1 Your own understanding
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.
Activity 1: Exploring your own understanding
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.
 Pause for thought
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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 |
Case Study 1: Finding out about students’ ideas
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:
- one litre of hot water and one litre of cold water
- half a litre of hot water and one litre of cold water
- one litre of hot water and half a litre of cold water.
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.
Pause for thought
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Why this approach is important