Research Of Conceptual Change Supported By Visualization Tools

Conceptual change is one of the most important research field of learning sciences, it is more and more get the attention of academic circles. The scientific knowledge, what students learn, is often in the form of scientific principles, rules and laws, but perhaps, understanding scientific models is more important to students. Model not only contains the scientific rules, but also contains the context information of rules how to use and when to use, it is very valuable for students’science study that examining students’scientific concept in the model level. Visualization is a powerful tool to make scientific model visible. Therefore, designing and developing an effective visualization tool is an ideal way to explore and research conceptual change. As far as the research literature and practice, domestic theory research on conceptual change is more, and the practice of visualization software design and development is not a few, but fewer researchers consider the combination of both, and lack the further practice research for a long time. According to these situation, this thesis will mainly carry out practice research, the dissertation contains seven chapters:The first chapter is introduction. It mainly describes the research origin, the research problem and research significance, research methods, research ideas and frameworks, the definition of the core concepts, as well as the innovation of the research.The second chapter is domestic and international research literature review. It mainly analyzes the domestic and foreign research literatures about conceptual change, science learning, model and visualization, the model of heat and temperature. On this basis, the author selectively analyzed the research about understanding of heat and temperature supported by visualization tools from Lewis and Foley, it provides a train of thought and framework for this study.The third chapter is research design and software development. It describes the experimental school and sample selection, research design and analysis, as well as the software design and development. Research design and analysis elaborate the experimental group arrangement, test process and coding, as well as the method of data collection and processing, etc. The experimental group and control group scores are combined together to carry on the analysis, independent sample t-test is used to determine whether there was a significant difference on the average test score between different groups. Paired sample t test is used to compare the test results from pre-test and post-test. Spearman’s rho is used to calculate and determine whether there is significant correlation between the problem. Chi-square test suggests code distribution of individual problem from test and homework.The fourth chapter, chapter 5 and chapter 6 is the result analysis of the experiment, including quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Quantitative data is mainly the test scores of two groups students in the whole experiment process, containing Pre-test, different activities and homework sheet, as well as post-test, the quantitative data is used to depict the overall student learning differences. Quantitative data analysis shows that two conclusions, first, the advantages of the experimental group students mainly reflected in the visual activities. Second, all the experimental group and control group students form a higher level of understanding.Qualitative data mainly include two aspects, one is drawing of students in the experiment, the second is four case studies. The drawing qualitative data analysis of two groups students shows, the answer for heat and temperature difference from the experimental group students is more comprehensive. When visualization is available, many of the experimental group students can understand it, but in the absence of visualization, they are not likely to use it.This suggests that, although experimental group students can understand the energy density model hidden behind the visualization, but they are not integrating it into their own model library, they may forget some key details about the model, and can’t apply it to solve the problem. A part of control group students use drawing to integrate useful heat visualization to their own model library, drawing and computer visualization had a similar effect.For case study analysis, first of all, some students can understand the relation between point density visualization and the energy density model of temperature, in the case study, the students’using the energy density model and their understanding about point density characterization or through direct viewing visualization that are coincident..The second point, students will often show no understanding of visualization, forgotten or failed to apply point density characterization to practical problems.Qualitative data from the case study shows that students may have difficulty in visual interpretation, the model integrated into their model library and extracting the appropriate model in different situation.The difficulties suggest that the educator should arrange orderly effective tools to support students learning. Qualitative data can show the details of the students’learning, effectively supplement the results of quantitative analysis.The seventh chapter is discussion and enlightenment. It will return back to the research question, discussing the limitation of this research, inspiration of research result to the understanding of science education and learning software design. This chapter also describes the influence and significance of study results in science teaching, software design, and the future research, as well as the the future research direction.