earticle

영어

This study aimed to investigate the high school students' conceptions about the plate tectonics through visual representation. For this purpose, the subjects were 67 students in 11th-grade high schools in Chungbuk. In order to in-depth understand the students' conceptions about plate tectonics, so the investigator conducted a semi-structured interview. The conclusions were as in the following. After learning the plate tectonics, the students had the alternative conceptions associated with terminology, colors' meanings, plate-related melting, plate's movement, plates' boundaries, mantle's physical conditions, driving forces for plate movement, and they had the organic relations about colors' meanings, mantle's physical conditions, and driving forces of plate movement. Also, the visual representation used to teach plate tectonics influenced on the students' responses about terminology, plates' boundaries, plate-related melting and the mantle's physical features, also this study found the factors of visual representation causing the learners to create alternative conceptions. These results implicated the importance of teacher's role in identifying the students' interpretation process on visual representation, and it needed to improve the factors creating students' alternative conceptions about visual representation and to study the factors further.