| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 科學教育研究所 === 98 === This research examined students’ comprehension of visual representations, conceptions of molecule, and their correlation. In order to deconstruct the visual representational competence, the present study developed a taxonomy of visual representational ability index (VRAI) and an instrument, the components were included in the VRAI framework, that is perception, interpretation, transformation and connection, selection and evaluation. The design of levels of visualization skills were also included in the VRAI. The present study developed two instruments, one is visual representational competence test, and the other is molecule conceptions comprehension test. The internal reliability were .88 and .84 respectively.
The results of visual representational competence revealed that (1) Students comprehended better in representations with single information than in representations with multiple information. (2) Students had difficulties in describing the surface features of representations for the microscopic phenomenon, which were concept-laden to students. (3) Students who held some concepts of molecules could describe the representations based on syntactic rules. (4) Students tended to interpret and connect different representations based on surface features. (5) Students had a lot of difficulties in describing representations which involved the nature of molecule. (6) Students had difficulties in perception of three-dimensional information.
The results of molecule comprehension revealed that (1) Students tended to interpret the concepts of molecule based on the concepts of the nature of particles. (2) Students comprehended the concepts of chemical process than the concepts of the nature of molecule.
The results of visual representational competence revealed that (1) Some of the high performance students could not interpret representations based on semantic meaning. (2) Low performance students could not describe the surface features of microscopic representations.
Several pedagogical implications could be drawn from this study. (1) It appeared that students had limited comprehension in different molecule-related representations, which need to be emphasized in learning. (2) It seems that understanding of process-related concepts may promote students deep understanding of the concepts of molecule. (3) It may be helpful for students to learn how to distinguish the nature of particles and the perspective of molecule.
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