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Department of Physical and Astronomical Sciences- University of Palermo, Italy
GIREP Seminar
2003
Researches on cognitive processes and epistemological analysis of physics evolution have pointed out that teaching/learning approaches focused on modelling of physical phenomena can constitute good frames of reference faithful to the discipline and pupils’ learning needs. Moreover, it is widely accepted that the using of Information Technologies in mathematics and physics teaching helps pupils to overcome some difficulties dealing with learning of scientific concepts and procedures.
The paper presents an example of pedagogical strategies and tools aimed to make pupils aware of the reasoning procedures pointed out in order to describe, formalise and explain some real systems, as for example the flight of an airplane. These procedures involve well defined steps (as to identify relevant elements of a given observation, to define the associated variables, to predict relationships among them and to check predictions) and use ICT-based tools in order to scaffold the process of personal knowledge construction.
To prepare teachers aware of the teaching/learning strategies supporting a modelling approach implies to stimulate meta-learning competencies where conscious thought and “cognitively rich” processes are mainly involved. To identify and explicit the resources used by student-teachers to access and create knowledge became a relevant objective. This involves a more complex view of problem solving including steps as the building of physics problems and the adding reality to representations. Results concerning the implementations of these teaching/learning strategies in courses for pre-service teacher preparation are reported and discussed.