How do teachers, after their initial training, approach ramp research activities?

Abstract

This work aims to study what skills and to what degree our initial teacher training students have acquired after completing their Primary Education (PE) Degree studies. For this reason, at the end of the Didactics of Experimental Science (DES) subjects, we asked them to propose a laboratory activity for PE students to work on “The ramp as a machine”. The students’ worksheet had to contain: the curricular location, a contextualization to assess the everyday usefulness of this machine, a description of what it is and how to build it, the elements that characterize it, an investigation into the dependence of the applied force on the weight of the object and the slope of the plane, and a review of everything they had learnt. The results reveal both scientific and didactic achievements, during the training period and the persistence of worrying shortcomings (in particular, the inadequate use of language and the persistence of conceptual errors).