• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.105-119
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• 2007

Several studies have attempted to test students' misconceptions of physics and to provide teaching strategies in order to repair them. The results from these studies have revealed that the diagnosis of students' misconception is crucial, although they often failed to grasp the practice of its implementation. In terms of being a type of methodology for science education, the Internet allows large-scale surveys and investigations to be carried out in a relatively short period of time. This paper reports the results of the development, implementation, and evaluation of a WEb-based SYStem for TEsting students' Misconceptions in physics (WEBSYSTEM) aimed at three groups (science educational researchers who study students' physics conceptions using the system as a detector, school science teachers who practice it as an instructional material, and students who benefit from it for their self-directed learning). The web-based testing system is based on a review of the instructional development strategies of ADDIE (Gustafson, Branch, 2002; Rha, Chung, 2001). Results showed that WEBSYSTEM could work effectively as a multi-purposed tool for the three target groups with a further partial revision, providing educational researchers with resourceful data to study students' misconceptions in physics. Issues of administrative strategies, reexamination of questionnaires, and international collaboration via WEBSYSTEM are discussed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.730-748
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• 2008

Students often have tenacious physics misconceptions and many studies were conducted on engendering conceptual change. Correspondingly, there is much literature on alternative assessment and its role in student learning. This is a comparison study on using alternative assessments to improve common students' misconceptions in GCE Advanced Level Physics. This research also aims to affirm alternative assessment as a valid tool for learning and promote its use. This study involved two classes with 24 students each. For four weeks, electromagnetism was taught to students using the same classroom pedagogies but with different assignments. The control group completeda standard drill-and-practice assignment while the experimental group finished an alternative assessment. From the preliminary results, students who undertook the alternative assessment and the traditional assessment both improved, however, the treatment group did not perform statistically significantly better than the control group. The reasons will be discussed and commented and it is expected to have significant improvement on rectifying misconceptionsupon next batch of experimentation groups.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.57-64
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• 1990

In this study, novices' protocols were investigated on the basis of Mayer's analysis of mathematical problem solving. These protocols were obtained by Jae-Sool Kwon and Seong-Wang Lee(1988) by means of thinking aloud while 20 sophomore students in a department of physics education were solving physics problems on Newton's low of motion. The results of investiqation are as follows; (1) We proposed an effective method in analyzing protocols on physics porblem solving (2) We could find the defective types of knowledge of individuals who got an incorrect solution, through analyzing the cause of failure individually (3) The fact that many students considered first the frictional force as muntiplying the coefficient of friction by perpendicular force rather than as resistance of motion, was found And students' misconception on the coefficient of friction was found. (4) If such analyses of test items and protocols are used in physics education, they will be very useful for finding the faults of problem-solving process, and for setting and scoring subjective problems in physics

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.25 no.spc5
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• pp.476-484
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to examine the misconception profiles of the scientifically-gifted and non-gifted children in terms of basic physics concepts and to compare them in terms of the types of differences in misconception as well as in their understanding of the concepts themselves. The subjects of this study were 75 scientifically-gifted children attending the Educational Center of Gifted Children in DNUE and 148 non-gifted children in elementary schools in Daegu city. For the purposes of this study, the basic concepts of physics (heat, electromagnetism, force, and light) which should be learned in an elementary school were selected with a review of related previous research and with an analysis of the 7th science curriculum. Next, a questionnaire was made which was made up of 20 multiple choice statement based items. Analysis of the results of the statement sections in the test, it was hoped, would reveal the difference between the scientifically-gifted and the non-gifted children's understanding, while the responses in the multiple choice items would suggest the differences between the two groups in terms of the misconceptions regarding physics concepts. The results of this study are as follows: First, although both the gifted and non-gifted children showed a low level of understanding of the concepts of heat, electromagnetism, force, and light, the gifted children' level of understanding of those physics concepts was proved to be significantly higher than the non-gifted, so it seems that the scientifically-gifted children have fundamentally understood the concepts in physics and have a higher level of understanding of them. Additionally, both the scientifically-gifted and non-gifted children' level of understanding of all the concepts was lower in the order of electromagnetism, heat, force, and light. This shows that both the scientifically-gifted and the non-gifted children have no difference in the level of understanding of any specific physics concept, but have similar levels of difficulty in every concept. Second, both the scientifically-gifted and non-gifted children showed similar types of misconceptions. However, the scientifically-gifted children had fewer misconceptions than the non-gifted. We suggest that scientifically-gifted children's misconceptions were not fixed yet, so there remained a possibility of them being corrected easily with appropriate instruction.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.621-637
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• 2004

In science education, the research on students' conceptions has been started in early 1970. From the early 1980, the research on students' conceptions stimulated the research on conceptual change. Recently, mental model has been a theoretical background in concrete arguments on "how students' conceptions are constructed or created?" Mental model has been studied early in cognitive psychology, and several researchers have studied it partially in science education area. In this study, we compared different theories that explained students' conceptions in, mainly, physics. Further we discussed the possibility of mental model as a theory that could integrate different explanations about students' conceptions from different theory.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.77-87
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• 2000

The purpose of the study is to understand the change process of middle school students' physics conceptions by the presented types of conflict situations. 274 middle school students were selected from one school in Pusan, however 257 students were participated in all the procedure of the study. After we classified students' physics conceptions into scientific and unscientific conceptions, presented three types of conflict situations. In this study three different cognitive conflict strategies were adopted; the first one is logical arguments(LCS: logical conflict situation), the second is actual demonstration(DCS: demonstrational conflict situation), and the third is two strategies together(DLCS). In this study, first, we investigated the change process of students' physics conceptions by three types of conflict situations. Second, we compared the effect of three conflict situations presentation, which includes positive effect by conceptual change from misconception to scientific conception and negative effect by conceptual change from scientific conception to misconception. Third, we studied characteristics of conceptual change by characteristics of conflict situations. In result, DLCS group and DCS group were more positive effect than LCS group in mechanics, DLCS group and LCS group were more positive effect than DCS group in electricity. It seems that mechanics are closely related to physical experiences, while electricity are more abstract.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.131-140
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• 2004

Many idealizations and ideal conditions in physics have been an important role in understanding of the basic physics concepts and in solving physics problems. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships of pre-service teachers' misconception of heat with their understanding of the ideal conditions involved in solving problems of heat and temperature. Test instruments were composed of two parts. One part was asked to answer the heat conceptions, the other to write statements in relations to ideal condition hidden in the process of heat problems solving. For this study, pre-service teachers who are in four major courses in the University of Education in a local city were selected and total numbers of pre-service teachers were 108 students. The framework was developed for classifying pre-service teachers response of open items of ideal conditions of heat domains. According to the framework, each types of response were coded, analyzed and processed with a SPSS/PC program. The results are as the followings. In the heat conceptions, most of students showed correct response, and there was no significant differences between major courses. In understanding of ideal conditions, students' responses of "idealized condition relevant to problem" showed 65.2％ of them, and "not relevant idealized conditions" 15.5％, and no response 12.2%. In the 15.5% of students "not relevant idealized conditions", 10.5％ of them did not explained correctly conditions, just simply 2.7％ stated the laws in physics or formula, 1.6% generally, but irrelevantly described the idealized conditions. More importantly pre-service teachers showed very weak correlation between heat conception and understanding of ideal condition. Although we concluded there were no significant relationships of heat conception in understanding of ideal conditions in thermodynamics domain, these suggest that many other factors may influence understanding of ideal conditions in physics.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.71-91
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• 2004

For the education of scientifically gifted high-school students in the field of relativity, we have executed a research on the understanding of relativistic concepts through the case study of its students of Busan Science Academy appointed as a high school for the gifted education in science. We showed the analysis of the changes in students, understanding in the field of (special) relativity and their possible causes. The comparison of the pre-test and the post-test tends to support that the students attained better understanding through the instruction of relativity. Students' understanding and misconception of relativistic concepts were also investigated through the case study. The students showed low degree of understanding in the validity of the principle of relativity, the influence of the constancy of the speed of light on the classical physics, etc. It seems that the analysis of these concepts of insufficient understanding can make a contribution to designing the education of relativity for scientifically gifted students.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.1027-1037
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• 2010

Comparing to the other subject, the relationship among physics contents is strong from the perspective of knowledge order as grades go up. That is, The things already that students learned, are learning and will learn are closed related from grade to grade. We expect students to be proactive and creative in studying physics, which is the goal of 21th century, analyzing their knowledge structure based on the knowledge order through assessment. Especially, using computer system, we provide students with substantial feedback for the assessment as well as objective validity is increased along with speedy and exact process in a bid to help students' mathematical understanding grow. This paper seeks to analyze the data from assessment applying knowledge spaces of the scientifical gifted in the force and the motion concept to applicate on teaching method.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.449-457
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• 2014

Recent studies have shown that teachers should have be aware of and understand students' misconceptions, which is one of the major components of PCK. However, teachers often have difficulties in understanding misconceptions and in applying appropriate instructional strategies to change misconceptions. Thus, we designed a method course for pre-service teachers (PSTs) adapting the concept of "teacher as researcher". In the course, PSTs conducted research to investigate students' misconceptions in physics. Twenty-five female PSTs participated in the study. They went through the research process including creating question items, administering items to their target populations, collecting and analyzing student responses, and writing a research paper. Data source included individual interviews with the PSTs, field notes during classroom observation and PSTs' research papers. The results were as follows. First, the PSTs confirmed students' misconceptions and learning difficulties in physics. They experienced discrepancies between their conjecture and research findings. Second, PSTs developed the sophisticated understanding of students' misconceptions and appropriate teaching strategies. Third, the research experience provided the PSTs opportunities to reexamine their physics content knowledge while creating items and explaining scientific concepts. They realized that physics teachers should develop sound understanding of physics concepts for guiding students to have less misconception. Lastly, they realized the necessity of being a teacher as a researcher.