3 The ideas children have about heat and temperature

You are now going to find out what ideas your students hold about heat and temperature.

Activity 2: What ideas do your students hold?

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:

  • you are interested in their ideas
  • you don’t want them to work together this time because you want this to be their ideas only
  • this is not a test and not to worry about wrong or right answers
  • you are going to collect in their answers to help you plan your teaching.

Pause for thought

  1. How did your students react to the activity? How did you reassure them?
  2. What did you learn about your students’ ideas?
  3. Did your students have alternative conceptions? What were these? Did these include any of the alternative conceptions listed previously in this unit?
  4. What could you do to improve the activity if you did it again?

2 Alternative conceptions about heat and temperature

4 Helping students to change alternative conceptions