Mercè Izquierdo

Exploring the development of students' conceptual profiles of chemical change

A naturalistic small-scale study was carried out, involving a class from a senior high school in Spain over two years. The students were requested on two occasions to write an essay about chemical change. The essays were subjected to text analysis techniques. Four conceptual profiles were identified: the interactive, the meccano, the kitchen, and the incoherent. The development of these profiles is reported and the implications of our research for the process of teaching the concept of chemical change are given.

The substantialisation of properties in pupils' thinking and in the history of science

The ideas used by some 13 year old pupils to explain the properties of substances and their changes are analysed and discussed in this paper. A significant number of pupils use explanations which have been categorised as ‘substantialisation of properties’. This categorisation has been justified in this paper on the basis of a study of the history of science. An analysis of the consistency with which students use this type of explanation, and factors favouring its use, has been carried out.

The Role of Language in Modeling the Natural World: Perspectives in Science Education

This chapter departs from previous handbooks’ chapters on language in science education, such as those written by Sutton (1998) and Carlsen (2007), in that it introduces a research program that specifically addresses the relationship between language and modeling processes in science education. The field will be reviewed taking into account the science education research work from Brazilian, French, Spanish, and British schools and other contributions. This review will consider the perspectives used to understand and depict language, models and modeling in science education. In addition, examples will be offered from the research work that point to the ways language and modeling are related in the science classroom. The international handbook (Fraser and Tobin 1998) contains a chapter on models and modeling in science education (Gilbert and Boutler 1998) that was not included in the most recent handbook, published in 2007. We would like to revive this perspective and propose a model-based view of science education in which language is central in science teaching and learning processes.

The History of Science in Teacher Training Programs: A Series of Contributions and Debates for the Teaching of Electrochemistry

The authors investigate a course for a pre-service teachers’ training program in Chile. The theoretical support of the course is Stephen Toulmin’s pragmatic and natural view of science, and the contributions of the history of the science to science teaching. The main results show that in a training process based on the history of science it is possible to innovate and contribute positively to the teaching of electrochemical theory, generating metacognitive skills.