Journal of Baltic Science Education

709-710

Authors: Editorial Board

Cover, JBSE, Vol. 12, No. 6, 2013

712-715

Authors: Paolo Bussotti

My research fields are history of mathematics and science, mainly physics and astronomy. I have also published some works on mathematics and physics education (as to these works see Bussotti 2012a; Bussotti 2012b; Pisano-Bussotti, 2012; Bussotti 2013). I have often wondered which role history of science can have inside science education, basically referring to high school and university students. This subject dates back at least at the second half of the 19th century when an important debate took place in Europe as to the most appropriate manner to teach Euclidean geometry. There were various positions: scholars who thought Euclid (fl. 300 BC) had to be completely abandoned, others who believed that the Elements had to be almost literally taught and, between these two opposite extreme opinions, a series of intermediate ones existed (for this problems see Bussotti, 2012a, where a series of references is presented, too). The discussion on the role of history of science/mathematics inside science/mathematics teaching is hence a long period debate and I have no pretension to provide an answer, but only to point out some questions and to develop a reasoning around them.

730-746

Authors: Serap Ergin, Şengül Atasoy

The purpose of this study is to determine pupils’ misconceptions about the electricity and the effects of 4MAT teaching method on these misconceptions. For this purpose, a non-equivalent pretest-posttest control group design was adopted and a three tier test with a sample of 100 ninth grade pupils was used to detect pupils’ misconceptions about the electricity. The analysis of the data showed that pupils have the following misconceptions; local reasoning, attenuation model, empirical rule model, shared current model, current-potential difference confusion, short circuit misconception, current flow as water flow, power supply as a constant current source model and sequential reasoning etc. It was determined that the frequency of most of the misconceptions decreased after the application of the innovation. A greater fall was observed in the experimental group which suggests that the 4MAT teaching method was more effective than the traditional method in reducing misconceptions. Based on the results of this study, investigation of the effects of 4MAT teaching method on other complicated subjects of physics such as magnetism, regular circular momentum is suggested for further studies.

759-773

Authors: Uladzimir Slabin

Knowing students' opinions about instructor's screen sharing via various media is important for developing online science courses including chemistry. This study examined university students’ opinions about the idea and the practice of instructor’s screen sharing via websites on example of join.me, VoIP-applications on example of Skype, and multi-user 3D virtual environments on example of Second Life. It was conducted during summer course of General Chemistry at University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences in Eugene, USA, for two consecutive years, 2001 and 2012. The data were collected through an online 14-item 4-point Likert-type questionnaire and students’ reviews. It was found that students have primarily positive opinions about screen sharing regardless of their gender, major, residence, and employment status. Join.me was found to be the most and Second Life to be the least favored media for screen sharing. Students with higher final grades provided more positive opinions.

784-792

Authors: Nazan Kunduz, Nilgün Seçken

The purposes of this study are to develop a computer-assisted instructional material, which involves animations, virtual lab and educational computer applications, based on 7E learning model towards the methods of Mohr and Volhard in the unit “precipitation titrations” delivered in some quantification chemistry courses and to identify the effects of this material on student achievement. The study employs the design of quasi-experimental with control and experiment groups to which pre- and post-test were administered. The participants of the study includes 89 vocational high school students. The data were collected through the administration of the test which was used as both pre- and post-test. The Cronbach alpha coefficient of the achievement test was found to be 0.756. The findings obtained were analysed through t-tests. The findings indicate that post-test scores of experiment group and control group on the achievement test were statistically significant different. This difference indicates that the software has positive effects on student achievement.

803-812

Authors: Miro Puhek, Matej Perše, Tina Vršnik Perše, Andrej Šorgo

In the present research the results of 288 lower secondary schools in-service teachers, 192 undergraduate students and 211 lower secondary school students from Slovenia were analysed in terms of importance of fieldwork and the information and communication technology (ICT) as a solution for supporting or replacing fieldwork itself. The main aim of the analysis was to compare the points of view in all stages: from students to teachers. Also, comparisons with international data obtained as part of TIMSS and TALIS studies were made. The analysis showed that participants tend to acknowledge a very positive effect to this kind of learning, despite the obstacles connected therewith. A comparison of the usage of ICT at home and in the school environment, as predicted, showed that students tend to be more digitally competent than their teachers. Also, the statistically significant difference pointed out that older teachers are less favourable towards ICT in education than their younger colleagues.

829-839

Authors: Veronika Machková, Martin Bílek

The wide development of the information and communication technologies provides conditions for using various digital learning objects in education. In Chemistry learning and teaching computer simulations are used for increasing clearness in Chemistry lessons and for supporting experimental activities in laboratory work. For this analysis the topic of acid-base titration was chosen. The research sample included educational simulations of acid-base titration available free on the Internet. In total 35 educational simulations of acid-base titration were found and used for didactic analysis with following research questions: What can be learned from educational simulations of acid-base titration? and How can didactic analysis of different kinds of simulation help to teacher and learner? In the research results of didactic analysis of 35 examples of acid-base titration simulators are presented. Resulting from the analysis we find three different types of educational simulations of acid-base titration with a specific use in Chemistry lessons: (1) simulations of experiments; (2) generators of titration curves according to the user’s choice; (3) presentations of one titration. The summary of all analysed simulations and proposals of their educational applications is available from the web site http://titrace.wz.cz.