An exploration of the 7th grade students' conceptual change of homeostasis from ontological emergent perspective

• Main Authors: Jia-Hsing Huang, 黃佳杏
• Other Authors: Mei-Hung Chiu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05685622463033096048

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 科學教育研究所在職進修碩士班 === 95 === Abstract The concept of homeostasis is important and yet difficult to learn. Students have to interrelate various physiological knowledge, catching the abstract and dynamic whole view, so that they may construct a complex framework of the concept of homeostasis. As for concept learning, Slotta & Chi（2006）proposed that it could be facilitated by providing ontological training prior to instruction. While there is not any study on the conceptual change of homeostasis from an ontological perspective, so this study is trying to develop a multiple media instruction material including attributes of emergent casual process and examine how students could benefit from it. The main research questions were as follows. First, could the multiple media instruction material including attributes of emergent casual process help students learn the concept of homeostasis? Second, as for conceptual ontology, could this instruction help students change from direct casual process to emergent casual process? Third, was there correlation between the achievements of concept learning and conceptual ontology? This research chose three sub-topics among the concept of homeostasis: homeostasis of human temperature, water and blood sugar. Five 7th-grade classes were assigned randomly to three groups: experiment group A (emergent instruction material of two sub-topics), experiment group B (emergent instruction material of one sub-topic), group C (comparison group). The results were as follows. First, as for concept learning, the experiment groups performed better than the comparison group. Second, as for the conceptual ontology, the experiment groups also gained higher scores than the comparison group, and had greater effects than the comparison group. Third, the achievement of concept learning and the conceptual ontology are significantly related.