Abstract
In the years 2004-2006 the National Centre of Professional Development in Education (Finland) and the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Tampere, Finland carried out together nine in-service courses under the title “Teaching physics and chemistry at grades 5 and 6”. As a home assignment between three contact periods, I asked teachers to collect authentic material on their pupils’ science thinking with the help of some carefully planned inquiry tasks. In the article, I present some examples of the most typical responses which primary school pupils gave to the question: “When the lights are turned off in a room on a dark winter night, the darkness will take over the room in the twinkling of an eye. Where do the rays of light which last left the lamp disappear?”. The explanations were categorised under six metaphors describing the different ways of understanding the disappearance of light.
Highlights
Preconceptions regarding the phenomena of physics have been studied for a long time and a lot of research information about preinstruction learners’ conceptions and representations has been accumulated
As optics forms one of the traditional content areas of school physics, naturally many preconceptions related to this area have been studied (Galili & Lavrik, 1998; Langley, Ronen & Eylon, 1997; van Zee, Hammer, Bell & Roy, 2005)
As stated above the data acquisition of the study was carried out so that each teacher who participated in our in-service course asked his/her pupils or his/her colleague’s pupils to explain the phenomena described in the inquiry tasks
Summary
Preconceptions regarding the phenomena of physics have been studied for a long time and a lot of research information about preinstruction learners’ conceptions and representations has been accumulated. As optics forms one of the traditional content areas of school physics, naturally many preconceptions related to this area have been studied (Galili & Lavrik, 1998; Langley, Ronen & Eylon, 1997; van Zee, Hammer, Bell & Roy, 2005). Knowledge of the pupils’ preconceptions and the skill to take preconceptions into consideration in teaching has become the core of the science teachers’ professional competency.
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