An Investigation Of Student Understanding Of Some Geometrical Optics Concepts At School And University Levels

Basic physics concept is the core in physics learning. Since 1970s, investigation of student understanding about physics concept and concept changing has been a hot topic of international physics education. Up to now, many researches have proved that there is a gap between teaching and learning under traditional teaching model. Investigators think that students come to formal introductory physics course with their own comprehension, which is labeled as "preconception", about external things and physical phenomena through their exploring and acclimating environment around them. Preconception can seriously affect how student to understand nature phenomena and scientific explanation, and can constitute obstacles to establishing scientific conceptions. In actual teaching, teachers often ignore students' former knowledge states for many reasons, which makes students learn difficultly. In order to obtain physics learning target, effective teaching must know all kinds of students' ideas, find out students' misconceptions in their cognitive structures, and take the corresponding teaching strategies to correct students' unscientific ideas.The present research is carried out in combination with disciplinary education under the guidance of constructivist learning theory in one specific domain -----geometrical optics. Our purpose is to diagnose the students' difficulties about some basic physics concepts by clinical interview and diagnosis test. We try to sum up the situations of students' conceptual understanding at different grades, to analyze why the misconceptions came into being, and to givesome suggestions to the teaching of the physics concepts so as to offer some basic work for the reform of the physics instruction.To achieve the aim, I have read many related literatures published at home and abroad, and known about the content and methodology concerning the research of students' conceptual understanding in physics and an overview of the research on the conceptual understanding in geometrical optics concepts is given in the thesis. We think that the criterion for the understanding of concepts is that students can establish deep and material contact between new conception and students' prior cognitive structures, and can relate the concepts with the real world to resolve some actual problems. On the basis of a lot of related researches, combined with learning experience of myself, and consulting with some teachers who have many years of teaching experience, and sampling in small scope, I drafted Diagnostics Test On Geometrical Optics Concepts Understanding. In the past year, we investigated 352 students, who have already studied geometrical optics, in middle schools and university in Guang xi. The major methods are diagnostic text and individual interview in the research. In this way, we know about the students' genuine ideas. We discover that students have difficulties in understanding rectilineal propagation of light, the law of reflection,visual,image formation by a plane mirror and the real image formed converging lens. The research proves that the preconception is stubborn and prevalent. The research shows that traditional teaching makes student learn rigescently, which can cause student's ability on solving actual problem weak; And also shows that though student can choose right answer, this can not imply student really understand conceptions. Further more, I have analyzed why the misconceptions come into being on the basis of knowing the situations of all kinds of students' conceptual understanding. Firstly, misconception originates mainly from preconception; Secondly, ill formal school teaching can induce misconception, too. Thirdly, students' some ideas are consistent with archaic philosopher, which are usually uneasy to be changed. Finally, irrelevant transfer can also cause misconception. At the end of this research, I put forward some suggestions on physics concepts teaching. We think it is necessary to acknowledge and try to discover students' misconception at first, we should attach i...