High School Students’ Understandings of Models in Biology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28976/1984-2686rbpec2022u909934Keywords:
Models in Biology, Epistemology, Nature of Science, Biology Teaching, Science TeachingAbstract
This study aims to identify and analyze students' conceptions about aspects of scientific models. Individual, semi-structured interviews were carried out on high school students, who answered to questions related to biology, grouped into general (without examples) and specific (with examples). The theoretical framework used for the analysis and attribution of meaning to the outcomes of the interviews is based on the categories and levels of complexity developed by Grünkorn et al. (2014). The corpus was examined and classified according to aspects of understanding of models: nature, multiplicity, objectives, mutability and model testing. Data demonstrated a significant presence of the idea of model as ‘a copy of the original’, in addition to a considerable association between model and scientific method, among other characteristics. Additionally, it was possible to notice that these conceptions vary according to the type of question (general or specific) and the content of the examples, in the case of specific questions. Based on these results, we raise the hypothesis that this variability can be explained in the light of G. Vergnaud's Theory of Conceptual Fields.
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