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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 12, Issue 2, Article 12 (Dec., 2011) |
This research is a part of "Nanotechnology student’s understanding conceptions and effect factor of K-12 students in Taiwan" of the National Science Council. In this research, we invited six senior high school teachers and two nano-tech experts to join the focus grouping interview, which convene once a month, and discuss about the project. First, six senior high school teachers, who are familiar with nanotechnology teaching materials, design the “senior high school nanotechnology curriculum” together, based on the “Nanotechnology declarative knowledge statements and the teaching standards”. The nano-tech teaching concept is settled by researcher and the high school teachers turned the concept, into a high school nano-tech curriculum, which includes descriptions of nano-tech phenomenon and nano-tech product. The teaching method like nano-science project camp (project-based learning), mix nano-tech curriculum into normal science class, thematic teaching, teaching the gifted education students, visited nano-tech lab etc… are the teaching methods senior high school teachers adopted in the research. Then, these teachers teach the nanotechnology lesson to twelve classes. After the lesson, we examine these students with “nanotechnology problem situation questionnaire”. Each student has 100 minutes to finish the questionnaires. Then, we use situational focus grouping interview to ask the students about their answers of the nano-tech concept and use these answer to lay down a criterion of the entire students and analyze the percentage of their correctness conception as well as the alternative conception. Finally, we discuss and analyze the alternative conception, according to the alternative conception category(Lu, 2003), which focuses on the guessing pattern, cognitive incorrect pattern, and answer correctly but incompletely pattern. In the end, we examine the matter from senior high school angles to analyze relation between high school nano-tech curriculum and high school student’s nano-tech concept.
In this research, we use “Nanotechnology Problem Situation Questionnaire(NPSQ)”, which was designed by Lu and Sung (2010) to examine the senior high school students’ learning on nanotechnology conception, which contained 17 proposition situations. First, we ask students to read the “proposition situation” and then answer one to three open-ended questions.
This study has chosen 503 senior high school students (12 classes) as sample. Students choosed from nanotechnology teaching schools, which join the NHRD program in Northern Taiwan. We choose 12 classes from 10 grades to 12 grades; all of them are participated this study.
Qualitative data
At first, analyze how senior high school teachers design senior high school nanotechnology curriculum. Then the researcher observes in class to collect and analysis how teachers guide students to learn nanotechnology and sum up the science conception of nanotechnology.
Quantitative data
Collect answers from “nanotechnology problem situation questionnaire” and then classify as well as analysis the frequency of their answers to verify whether it correspond to the qualitative information. Analysis nanotechnology conceptions: Classify conception into correct conception, and alternative conception (guessing pattern, cognitive incorrect pattern, and answer correctly, but incompletely pattern). In order to ensure the reliability of the data, the analysis of these data were conducted by two nanotechnology university professors and six experienced senior high school science teachers independently, using a constant comparison between the data sources for each student and an established rubric. We then met and discussed our judgments to reach consensus on the category of nanotechnology concepts and calculated the proportion of each correct conception and alternative conception.
