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Constructivistic workshops for children in physics teacher education
Marta Zuvic-Butorac
Department of Physics, Medical Faculty, University of Rijeka
Rajka Jurdana-Sepic, Branka Milotic
Physics Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Rijeka



GIREP Seminar
2003


The constructivistic approach suggests the experiment to be one of the most efficient methods for building concepts and models that make linkage between physical quantities and the natural phenomena, thus giving a valuable tool at all levels of physics teaching.When exposed to a simple demonstrative experiment with every-day materials and objects, children of a pre-physics-learning age are intuitively forming pre-concepts of natural phenomena. In most cases, they need help in order to form the firm concepts and to build the model that relate simple phenomena together. However, physics teacher's training very often lacks the knowledge and experience on shaping the concepts to understand natural phenomena at the very early cognitive stage. In order to fill this gap, we held a serial of workshops for elementary school pupils (pre-physics-learning age, 7-13 ys), using a constructivistic approach through a serial of experiments on a chosen subject (e.g. atmospheric pressure, etc.), in order to make the implementation of it into the physics teachers' education. Through this work it was possible to achieve at least two goals; 1) to search for the ways for developing creative and analytic thinking by construction of basic physical models through active learning at the very early stage, 2) to make improvements in the already existing and investigation of new methods in education of future physics teachers. The results directly affect the quality of physics teaching, by creating a new experinece for both partner sides in the process of learning.