Abstract
Our objectives in this project1 were to reconceptualize what it means to understand physics and to improve how it is taught. To achieve these objectives, we created an experimental curriculum in which students’ learning centers around interacting with computer microworlds (i.e., interactive simulations), and where the focus is as much on learning about the form and evolution of scientific knowledge as it is on the subject matter (which is Newton’s laws of motion). We conducted experimental trials of this curriculum with regular sixth grade students (i.e., 11 and 12 year olds) and regular sixth grade teachers. When we evaluated its effectiveness, we found that the sixth grade students taught with this approach did better on a set of classic force and motion problems than did a group of high school physics students taught using traditional methods.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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White, B.Y. (1992). A Microworld-Based Approach to Science Education. In: Scanlon, E., O’Shea, T. (eds) New Directions in Educational Technology. NATO ASI Series, vol 96. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77750-9_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77750-9_19
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