Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemMathematics and the preoperational child : why and how to use stories didactically( 1986)Premathematical concepts such as more/less are important for an understanding of mathematics in the primary school. The literature concerning the preoperational child's acquisition of concepts, their level of intellectual development, and the use of stories to introduce concepts is reviewed along with the literature concerning the way young children form an understanding of the concepts "more/less". Thirty preparatory children from a working class area were divided into two groups - one group was taught mainly with stories and the other group with the activities described in the Boehm Resource Guide for Basic Concept Teaching (1976). They were pre- and posttested with the Boehm Basic Concepts Test (1971). It was found that teaching using selected stories is as effective as using Boehm's special activities and that girls learn better with stories than boys. The children's knowledge of "more/less" and "most/least" was assessed in individual testing sessions using toy cars and sweets as stimuli. Approximately fifty per cent did not know "less", while a majority of the children had a stable knowledge of "more" in the sense of "greater in number". Approximately 65% of the. children understood "most" and approximately 19% understood "least". The Boehm Test was critically analysed and lists of books currently available from children's book shops or libraries, suitable for introducing and reinforcing children's knowledge of concepts of space, quantity and time, and miscellaneous concepts, have been compiled.
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ItemConceptual development in science practical work( 1987)In an investigation of the effect of practical work upon the conceptual understanding of high school biology students the author employed concept maps as the primary research tool. Practical reports and responses to interview questions were also analysed. Misconceptions were identified in the concept maps, practical reports and interviews. The interviews appeared to reveal the greatest detail of the students' misconceptions. The component scores of the students' concept maps were substantially unaltered by the performance of a practical exercise selected from a year 11 biology course. If concept maps are reflectors of conceptual understanding then it appears that the conceptual frameworks of the students were stable over the duration of the practical exercise. Several component scores of the concept maps were found to be significantly correlated with either the students' exam results or their practical work assessment. Concept maps may have application as predictors of academic performance or be used to supplement or replace traditional measures of achievement.
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ItemRestricted conjunctive concept attainment( 1970)A restricted conjunctive concept is defined by the joint presence of a number of relevant attribute values and the absence of another attribute value. Such concepts are relevant to scientific generalizations. Three series of experiments were performed. Experiments IA, IB, and IC were designed to investigate the relative difficulties of restricted conjunctive concepts and conjunctive concepts, using Neisser and Weene type nonsense syllables as stimuli. Ss found the restricted conjunctive concept slightly more difficult to attain; time to solution for the restricted conjunctive concept was significantly higher. In Experiment II, the effects of three factors upon restricted conjunctive concept attainment were investigated: presentation sequence,in which positive, negative, and restricted, instances were presented in different orders. . amount of irrelevant information, in which stimuli varied in the amount of irrelevant information they contained. instructional conditions, in which Ss were given no hints ("complete learning"), hints about the nature of the rule, ("attribute identification"), hints about the relevant attributes ("rule learning"). A 3-factor anova design was used; only presentation sequence was a significant source of variance. Experiment III was a study of a scientific restricted conjunctive concept. Diagrams representing objects, with symbols representing force, distance, angle, time and speed, were used to define a restricted conjunctive concept. A 3-factor anova design was used to investigate the effects of the same factors. As in Experiment II, presentation sequence was a significant source of variance; unlike Experiment II, irrelevant information was a highly significant source of variance. Experiments II and III provided data which were used to test the one-element Markov ("all-or-none") model of concept learning. Tests of the binomial distributions of four-tuples and stationarity could not reject this model. When the strings of responses were Vincentized, the model still could not be rejected for the data of Experiment II, but was clearly rejected for the data of Experiment III. A two-element (three-state) model might account for the data of both experiments, but this was not tested statistically.
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ItemAgency and communion in science teaching( 1991)The construction of the concept map assumes that the more closely two concepts are related in a person's cognitive structure, the more closely they will be placed on the concept map. In this research the Non-metric Multidimensional Scaling technique using ALSCAL (Alternating Least Squares Scaling) is used in the analysis of the concept map data, derived by surveying teachers from three different groups. Group 1 consisted of practicing teachers from a non-science background who taught Health and Human Relations. Group 2 consisted of Diploma of Education student teachers whose methods were Science and had completed their course though were not yet practicing teachers. Group 3 consisted of practicing teachers from a science background who taught Health and Human Relations. The results provide a basis for discussing the wisdom of practice, the maxim which provides reflective rationalization for the practices of able teachers. In this study, the wisdom of practice has been described with a focus on the responsibility of care. The findings of this study have confirmed those of earlier studies, in that it is apparent that experienced able teachers use their knowledge of what works in the class to organize their instruction. However, just what works is seen to depend on the subject the topic is taught in, as well as any perception of the subject held by teachers, students and the community. Teachers from each of the three Groups were able to organize their concept maps and provide satisfactory support material from transcribed interviews to indicate that the conceptual relations seen in the tension which exists between the concept of care and the concept of the academic is able to be described quantitatively.