http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/services/Feed ${session.getAttribute("locale")} 5 http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:7503 “Situational interest” is a short-term form of motivation which occurs when a specific situation stimulates the focused attention of students (e.g., a spectacular science demonstration could arouse transient interest amongst nearly all the students in a class, even those who are not normally interested in science). However, there have been very few studies of situational interest and its potential to motivate students in science classrooms. The purpose of this project was to investigate situational interest and its sources. Small groups of grade 9 students participated in a science lesson which focused on inquiry skills, and data were obtained on their interest levels and sources of interest. The results indicated that interest arousal was substantial but did fluctuate throughout the lesson, according to the types of activities in which students were involved. The main source of interest was novelty, although choice, physical activity, and social involvement were also implicated. 2011-04-07T02:40:06.681Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:6635 A constructivist paradigm has dominated science education research in recent years. According to this view, students use their existing reconceptions to interpret new experiences, and in doing so, these preconceptions may become modified or revised. In this way, science learning proceeds as children actively reconstruct their ideas as they become presented with new information. However, the implications of constructivism for classroom teaching are still open to question. This position paper refers to the science education literature to argue that strategies to arouse and maintain student motivation should be a crucial component of constructivist-informed classroom teaching. This is because constructivism is universally accepted to be an active process - students must make an effort to reconstruct their ideas, so it follows that if they are not motivated to make that effort then no learning will occur. However, extant models of constructivist classroom teaching make little if any mention of student motivation. In these models, the focus has typically been on strategies to elicit students' prior conceptions and to guide and monitor their progress towards more scientific conceptions, but the motivational impetus for this process has received little attention. Perhaps one reason for this is that there are relatively few studies of student motivation in the science education literature. Another possible reason is the lack of a unified theory of motivation, which means that there is no clear consensus on how best to motivate students in the classroom. In view of this situation, there is a need for studies which can clarify motivational strategies in science classrooms. "Situational interest" is one motivation construct which appears to offer considerable potential, yet it has been largely ignored by science education researchers. Situational interest occurs when a particular situation generates interest in the majority of students in the class - a spectacular science demonstration might arouse transient situational interest even in students who are not normally interested in science. The potential of this construct lies in the fact that studies outside of science have shown that when situational interest is aroused on a number of occasions it can result in longterm personal interest and motivation in the topic. It is thus a potentially powerful construct for science education, and is one which should be further explored. 2010-09-10T01:30:12.133Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:1313 Previous research has shown that elementary education majors often dislike science and lack confidence in their ability to teach it. This is an important problem because students who hold these attitudes are likely to avoid teaching science, or teach it poorly, when they become teachers. It is therefore necessary to identify preservice elementary teachers who hold negative attitudes towards science, and attempt to convert these attitudes to positive before they become teachers. This study was designed to identify students whose attitudes had changed from negative to positive (i.e., attitude exchange had occurred) after participating in a one-semester elementary science education course, and to identify the course factors that were responsible. Four participants were individually interviewed. The transcripts indicated that attitude exchange had occurred for each of the four students. Each student described several features of the course that had a positive influence. These were of three main types: personal attributes of the tutor, specific teaching strategies, and external validation. It was proposed that many of the individual factors were effective because they represented either performance accomplishments or vicarious experience as defined by Bandura (Psychological Review, 84, 1977, 191-215). 2010-04-27T06:56:38.066Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:1862 The aim of this study was to identify the type of conceptual change (assimilation or accommodation) that can be induced by a refutational text. Individual interviews were carried out with a stratified sample of eighty-seven grade 9 students. Forty-four percent of them were found to have a misconception about the concept of ecological role - they believed that some living things do not have a role in nature. These 36 students were asked to read either a text that refuted the misconception, or a control text that consisted of a didactic explanation of ecological role. They then participated in an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest. Surprisingly, both texts were able to induce accommodation in a large proportion of the students. Factors such as the high motivation of the students, encouragement of metacognition, age-readiness of the students, and a relative lack of robustness of the misconception were considered to have greatly facilitated the conceptual change process. 2010-04-27T06:35:04.584Z ]]>