The Effects of Learning Cycle on Changing the Students' Conceptions of Electric Current

전류 개념 변화를 위한 순환학습의 효과

The purpose of this study was to develop the instructional model and teaching material to change the middle school students'conceptions of electric current into the scientific ones and to investigate the effects of the model in actual classrooms. We identified the students' ideas and their misunderstanding about the concept of eIectic current through reviewing the literatures and our in this study. Based on the above results, we developed the instructional model and designed the teaching sequence and prepare the learning materials about the unit of the electric current in middle school Our instructional model was based on 'learning cycle' developed by Lawson, but the new stage called "exploration through qualitative questions" to elicit the students' own conceptions was inserted to it. To investigate the effects or the new teaching model, the pre- and post-test using the POE type were administered to experimental group(52 students) taught with learning cycles and control group(52 students) taught with traditional styles. The results are as follows; 1) The rates of correct. predictions was varying according to the kinds of problems. And the rates of the correct. reasons of their predictions were lower than those of the predictions. 2) The mean scores of the post-test of both groups were significantly higher than those of the pre-test. We could not find statistically significant difference in theme an score between experimental group and control group after implementation of the model. But the experimental group gained higher scores than those of the control group on two problem. Therefore, although we cannot show the prominent effects of our teaching model based on learning cycles, there are some effects of our model on changing the middle school students' conceptions of electric current.