Research purpose of the study to be done by Himanshu:

In the context of the topic of 'Motion and Force', find out the various routes by which the theory can / should be introduced to the students of class 9th and 10th and explore the criteria for prioritizing a few of the routes, deciding the sequence in which they could be applied, and the factors to be considered in any such approach.

Issues in Science Education today:

Worldwide, various groups who are doing research in Science education have been trying out different methods to come up with a better teaching strategy. They are focusing on issues like how preconceptions give rise to misconceptions; how to incorporate hands-on activities and thought experiments in order to get the students to understand various concepts; the role of guided inquiry and group discussions in classrooms. Tools like graphs and simulations have also been tried out in different scenarios, in different contexts and with different age group students.

Over the last twenty-thirty years, the focus of the research in science education in the area of children's conceptual understanding in science, has been changing very rapidly. One of the features of the Science teaching schemes which have been developed over last few years is first and foremost a rejection of science as a catalogue of facts. According to Grayson (2006), in the early 1980s, interest was in alternative conceptions that students held about various physical concepts. The mid-1980s saw an interest in computer-aided instruction. In the early 1990s, interest was on curricula that promoted hands-on learning. In the late 1990s, the focus shifted to student cognition. Nowadays there is a practically an unanimous consensus among the researchers' lobby about the need for a multi-pronged approach which brings out the relevance of the history of science, inquiry based learning, open ended group discussions in classroom or children’s daily-life-experiences in the educational process. All of these approaches obviously have strong implications for classroom practices since they involve a range of different pedagogical strategies. Now, the central question is what guidance can the research programme on children's conceptions and conceptual change offer to the teachers in reponse to current classroom practices, where there is hardly any space to intervene because of the pressure of syllabus completion or the need to produce good results in board examinations. How can instruction in science be changed so as to improve the students' ability to think independently and make abstractions or applications with the knowledge they have?

Even though there are plenty of activity and project books available in the market, we don't have materials that systematically develop understanding of basic concepts and themes. These activity books have random interesting items given without any ordering according to the concepts that they underline or the sequence in which they are used in order to form a conceptual framework. It is thus necessary to provide teachers and students with alternative possibilities in terms of materials on the key concepts that are interactive, contextualised or related to life, these should ideally be activity based so as to make the teaching and learning process lively engagement.

Developing alternative modules at Eklavya:

We are in process of developing theme based modules on science and technology. These modules could be used in the classroom with children and also in out-of-school situations. A typical module would explore the child’s prior understanding of the topic and elicit commonly held ideas relating to it. It would proceed step by step towards building the concept in question through the use of textual discussions, guidelines for activities and also descriptions of major historical experiments. They would also contain discussions of the application of these ideas in daily life, especially in the rural context with notes and instructions for teachers. In this sense, they would be different from usual textbook chapters. They can be used with students with guidance from a teacher, parents or others. We are also thinking of exploring the possibility of simultaneously bringing out ‘stand-alone’ material for children. Hence a module may have two components - one for teachers and the other for children.

As is our custom, these modules are being developed through the intense involvement of subject experts as well as school teachers and students. The added advantage of these modules would be that they would go through field trials in our own cultural contexts and would be accompanied by a minimal kit to assist the user.

The selection of topics for any such module is based on few assumptions like:

1. Indispensability of the concept in Science.
2. That concept should be able to explain a broad range of physical phenomenon.
3. It should have links with daily life.
4. It should throw light on the nature of Science (this is more related to how we treat the concept).
5. Most importantly, is it possible for children to understand this concept at this age (13-16 years of age)?

Alternative framework:

The very basic assumption that we start with is that the students coming to the class are not blank slates. They have already built up some conceptions about various phenomenon studied in science by perceiving the world around them. They seem to link these different alternative conceptions, weave them together and develop a schema at broader levels too. Sometimes this schema is very well defined and coherent when the students try to generalize a particular conception in different contexts and find no conflict in their arguments. But in general, these preconceptions are very immature and students would exhibit discrepancies while describing or trying to explain different situations.

Misconceptions:

The traditional classroom teaching does not address these pre-scientific notions at all. In fact, our system which encourages rote-learning and the pattern of evaluation followed does not reveal these misconceptions at all. In addition to this, there is a lack of conceptual clarity among teachers themselves and a lack of motivation. The content of textbooks and the strategy with which teachers plan their sessions cause further misconceptions among students. In fact, very few teachers appreciate and provide enough room for students' preconceptions and encourage their students into guided inquiry. Classrooms do not allow open ended group discussions; hardly any school allows students to do experiments on their own and even if they get the children to do some 'practicals', these experiments are mere verification experiments and the students go for the experiments with a very narrow mindset in which they already know the outcome of that experiment and they do all their best to come close to that theoretical result.

Misconceptions in 'Motion and Force':

The situation cannot be said to be better in any topic, but some of the difficulties are compounded in the area of mechanics. This topic 'Motion and Force' is introduced for the first time in class 9th and 10th formally. Before that there is hardly any work done on graphs or vectors and students are hardly exposed to any kind of experimentation skills. They have also not been encouraged to search for abstractions when they learn any new topic, and are not able to apply their learning in any new situations. Due to that, children try to imagine each problem situation independently. They look for attributes within each context that would help them answer the questions rather than apply in general principles that would work for all situations.

Few common misconceptions in this topic are:

1. There is no force acting on a stationary object.
2. The direction of motion is same as the direction of force applied on the object.
3. More amount of force implies more speed of the object.
4. Terms like work done, power, strength and energy are mostly interchanged with each other while arguing about any mechanics phenomenon.

Beyond this, there is a long list of misconceptions and confusions.


Exploring different approaches and their limitations:

At one level, every method has its own benefits, but there are certain limitations to every approach as well. For example: if Aristotelian physics is presented in a very fragmentary and oversimplified way, it distorts the whole meaning of Aristotelian concepts. Hurried identification of pre-scientific notions and Aristotelian physical concepts do not show the actual thoughts of Aristotle in action. The reading of the original texts is always a richer intellectual experience and that should be incorporated in the whole learning process somehow.

Similarly, the thought experiments, erroneous and correct both, have a special role in an ongoing process of conceptual refinement of naive physics learners. But they are more prone to errors than lab experiments. This process of evolving models can be unsuccessful because of either wrong assumptions or an inadequate picture of the world. So the students would require careful guidance to use this tool.

Activities, in and out of labs, have their advantages and they serve their very purpose in bringing out the nature of science. The development of curiosity, openness, objectivity, accuracy and cooperation in teamwork should be seen as other side benefits. But in Indian context, either schools do not have infrastructure for labs or even if they have it, they do not allow students to go independently and with open-mindedness into exploring phenomena and that kills the whole purpose of doing experiments.

In this particular context of kinematics or even in dynamics, graphs seem to be a quite promising tool. But in previous classes, a sufficient background of graphs is not being prepared. So, we propose to include the understanding and use of graphs in the module.

It is very clear that neither can all of these approaches be tried out simultaneously for very obvious constraints, nor that all of these are relevant in the context of 'Motion and Force'. So one needs to select and prioritize among these methods. Given the limitations of every approach, I would like to investigate the problem of prioritizing and look for what can/should be covered using a particular approach or a tool.


Relevance of the idea with my work:

As mentioned earlier, I am also part of the team working on this topic 'Motion and Force'. We have thought of a sequence and we are working on the content. We have recently organized a teachers' training to check out some of our developed material. Now we are in the stage where we have to supplement our material with different other tools like: simulations, graphs, experiments, etc. and try out various permutations and combinations in terms of the sequence. In parallel, we are referring to original research papers to come up with a proposal of a better teaching strategy. In that sense, this project seems to be promising and relevant.