The effect of meaning making instruction about Kepler's laws at high school students' conceptual understanding

Abstract

It is determined that ideas that were encountered in students are not generally compatible with scientific knowledge and these ideas were named as alternative conceptions. A large number of conceptual change studies were done intended for the change of alternative concepts that were encountered in students towards scientific knowledge. But no study was encountered intended for revealing students' alternative ideas related to Kepler's laws and for the conceptual change of these ideas in literature. The purpose of this study is to search the effects of education intended for creating 11th grade students' ideas related to Kepler's laws. This study was conducted with twenty-five 11th grade students. With the aim of provide students creating meaning of the concept forty-five minutes teaching were made. As a means of collecting data on the Kepler's laws a test consisting of two open-ended questions were used. This concept test was administered before instruction, after instruction and 15 weeks later after instruction. In the analysis of data analysis six categories were used. It is observed that students generally have no scientific ideas related to these concepts and have alternative ideas that are not related to scientific ideas. More than half of the students gave the scientific response after taking instruction. Rate of encountering alternative answers decreased after the instruction. At the delayed post-test responses in the category of scientific response rate increased. However, at students a higher proportion of alternative conceptions encountered according to before instruction.