Revisiting secondary students’ ideas about air pollution. The challenge of particulate matter

Abstract

Many studies have researched students’ ideas about air pollution, basically focusing on nature and impact of gaseous pollutants on human health. However, recent research has highlighted the importance of the role of particulate matter air pollution for a good air quality in cities. This phenomenon is especially interesting for exploring the limits of the particulate model of matter at the mesoscale with secondary students. The purpose of this research is to investigate the ideas of 14–15 year-old students about polluted air in terms of its structure and its nature and how these ideas change after the implementation of a model-based teaching and learning Sequence. An interpretative qualitative approach is used to explore students’ ideas and how they change. Pre- and post-multimodal representations of 205 secondary students were analysed. Results showed that a sophistication of students’ ideas about the nature of polluted air after the teaching and learning sequence is not necessarily related to the sophistication of its structure. Also, students’ ideas at the mesoscale are varied and include a range of different semicontinuous or discontinuous conceptions.