Exploration and categorisation of pre-service physics teachers' understanding of superconductivity and nanotechnology

Nanoscience and technology is a major field of scientific research and technological innovation but understanding concepts such as superconductivity and nanotechnology are not straightforward. To develop focused teaching strategies, it is necessary to categorise students’ prior understanding as different categories of prior ideas require different teaching strategies. An exploratory case study research design was followed to explore and categorise 21 pre-service physics teachers’ (PSPTs’) understanding of basic concepts of superconductivity and nanotechnology at a University in Oman. Self-compiled open ended questionnaires were used to elicit PSPT understanding of superconductivity and nanotechnology. Their understanding was categorised in epistemological and ontological categories. These six categories were: lateral alternative conceptions; ontological conceptions; naïve physics; phenomenological primitives (p-primes); mixed conceptions; and loose ideas. Findings from this pre-instructional study indicated that naïve physics ideas and lateral alternative conceptions were dominant and that the PSPTs’ conceptions were diversified and inconsistent. These results could lead to the development of evidence-based pedagogy, which is fundamental to the advancement of an effective physics education curriculum for these two contemporary topics.

The Social World

This chapter provides a very brief overview of the social capacities of young infants. Specifically, we the author ask whether infants instinctively know that (human) agents are distinct from objects. new see that newborn infants spontaneously imitate agents; they follow their gaze, and they selectively respond to human faces, but not objects. A few months later, infants also seem to know that (unlike objects), the behavior of agents is driven by their beliefs and goals, and they spontaneously prefer “good” agents (those that help others) to “bad” ones (those that hinder others from attaining their goals). These results suggest that young infants possess intuitive knowledge of psychology, distinct from their naïve physics.

Naive physics vs compositionality in evaluating the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis

It will be argued that the LAH suffers from being based on the naive physics originating from ordinary language philosophers, who practiced ontology rather than doing semantics. Their metaphysics turns out to be incompatible with the principle of compositionality. Due to them a verb has been taken as a predicate rather than as a linguistic unit with its own lexical meaning. Therefore the leniency of a verb in the sense of being available for a wide variety of arguments has been underestimated.

Event Structure without naïve Physics

What is the real nature of the aspectual division between perfective and imperfective as revealed by the well-known in/for-test? The answer is founded on the idea that this division between completion and incompletion mirrors our cognitive capacity to shift between discreteness and continuity as expressed in the number systems N and R. To get at the real contribution of a verb to aspectual information, the first step is to determine the basic atemporal building block making a tenseless verb stative or non-stative. For this, verbhood is to be understood aspectually in a very strict way abstracting from the contribution of arguments. It follows that one has to get ‘below’ event structure in order to see why the in/for-test works as it turns out to do (or in some cases not).

“Strange Trajectories”: Naive Physics, Epistemology and History of Science

In the 1980s naive physics almost suddenly became a field of research for physicists interested in teaching and experimental psychologists. Such research, however, was limited to accurately recording the bizarre Aristotelian responses of “layman” struggling with simple physics issues. Another research on this topic is that one of phenomenological origin: starting from the studies of the psychologist of perception Paolo Bozzi (since 1958) naive physics had entered the laboratory, and he was the first to find that the physical knowledge of the adult individuals were “Aristotelian”. Bozzi took advantage of these results in order to hypothesize a substantial diversity and independence of the sensory system with respect to the cognitive-rational one. Other interesting perspectives were considered by Piaget, who in the 1980s, confirming the spontaneous Aristotelism of children, provided a still prolific epistemological direction of such investigations: finding an explanatory mechanism that projects on the level of science construction that one of individual cognitive development.

2. Learning about the outside world

‘Learning about the outside world’ looks at the nature versus nurture debate and asks: how do infants and toddlers learn about their world? Babies learn a vast amount from observation. Research shows that the observations that babies make are organized mentally into certain types of knowledge. ‘Naive psychology’ is about how they learn how to behave. Observing objects teachers babies how the external world works. This is ‘naive physics’. ‘Naive biology’ refers to how they learn about the natural world. Studies have shown that although babies appear to be fairly unaware of the world around them, both memory and attention function from an early age.