A Qualitative Study on the Elementary School Students' Responses Produced by a Discrepant Event

불일치 사례로 유발되는 초등학생들의 반응에 대한 정성적 연구

In this study, elementary school students' responses toward a discrepant event about a float-or-sink problem were investigated through semi-structured interviews. Initial participants were 61 fifth-grade students from two elementary schools. After excluding the students who did not possess the target misconception from the results of a preconception test and who were not willing to participate in an interview, 31 students (14 males and 17 females) were finally interviewed by two teacher-interviewers. During the interviews, students were first provided with a hands-on experiment which was the same as the situation in the preconception test, and then they were asked about believability of the discrepant event, inconsistency between the discrepant event and their existing conceptions, and belief change after experiencing the discrepant event. Interviews were audio- and video-taped, and then were transcribed by two interviewers. After analyzing the interview transcriptions, we found four types of students' responses; rejection, uncertainty, peripheral belief change, and belief change. We also found that belief change response type should be classified into three distinctive subtypes; belief decrease, ad-hoc belief change, and analytical-abductive belief change.