Shulamith G. Eckstein

Improvement of reading comprehension of physics texts by students’ question formulation

Difficulties in reading comprehension of physics texts by college students were investigated. A strategy was developed to improve students’ reading comprehension. Students were taught the skill of formulating clear questions on textual material. The strategy stimulated students’ awareness of their difficulties in reading comprehension and could be used by students as a self‐monitoring technique to improve their reading comprehension.

Parallelism in the development of children's ideas and the historical development of projectile motion theories

A study of the development of childrens conceptions with respect to projectile motion was carried out in Ukraine and Israel, with the participation of 1017 subjects in grades 3 to 12. The purpose of the research was to investigate the fundamental hypothesis of genetic epistemology with respect to concepts of motion. The fundamental hypothesis states that the development of childrens concepts of nature parallel the historical development of the concepts. It was found that the development of childrens concepts of motion proceeds by stages, with the concepts at each stage parallel to a corresponding historical stage. A mathematical model was constructed to describe development by stages quantitatively. The theoretical model gave an excellent fit to the empirical data, and this supports the hypothesis of parallelism. The two‐country research made it possible to compare the effects of quite different school science curricula upon the development of childrens concepts.

Development of children's ideas on motion: intuition vs. logical thinking

The development of childrens concepts of motion was investigated among children from grade 4 (aged 9‐10 years) to grade 10 (aged 15‐16 years). A question relating to Galilean invariance and inertia was given to the children. Their responses were analysed and compared with those of university students. The two major categories of response were ‘intuitive’ (correct, but displaying faulty reasoning) and ‘logical’ (incorrect, but displaying logical reasoning). The proportion of responses in each category remained almost constant from grade to grade. The proportion of ‘logical’ responses among undergraduate university students who had already studied mechanics was not significantly different from the proportion of these responses among the schoolchildren.