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Abstract
This study attempts to characterise what 7th- and 12th-grade students believe they do not know about artefacts and natural objects, as well as the dependence of what is unknown on a knowledge of these objects. The students were asked to make explicit through questioning what they did not know about a sample of objects. The unknowns generated were categorised according to a scheme based on lexical semantics theory. Two of the categories focused specifically on imprecise unknowns expressed through What is X? questions, and on unknowns concerning functions. The results showed, firstly, that a lower grade level and lower knowledge of a certain class of objects was associated with more imprecise unknowns. Secondly, unknowns about the functions of artefacts were significantly more frequent than unknowns about the functions of natural objects at any of the grade levels. Overall, the results were consistent with the hypothesis of a correspondence between knowledge and unknowns.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by FEDER and the ‘Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia’ in Portugal within the ‘Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade-COMPETE’ [grant number PTDC/CPE-CED/105546/2008] and by the Ministry of Science in Spain [grant number Edu 2008-05359]. We gratefully acknowledge the participation of the teachers and students from the Quinta das Flores, Avelar Brotero, José Falcão and D. Duarte schools in Coimbra, Portugal. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.