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Abstract
Analogies are parts of human thought. From them, we can acquire new knowledge or change that which already exists in our cognitive structure. In this sense, understanding the analogical reasoning process becomes an essential condition to understand how we learn. Despite the importance of such an understanding, there is no general agreement in cognitive science literature about this issue. In this study, we investigated students' analogical reasoning as a creative process where an environment was set up to foster the students' generating and explaining their own analogies. Data were gathered from pre- and post-teaching interviews, in which the 13–14-year-old students were asked to make comparisons that could explain how atoms are bound. Such data supported the discussion about how students reasoned analogically. Our results made it evident that the task aims and the students' salient knowledge exerted a great influence on the drawing of analogies.
Acknowledgements
The second author thanks ‘Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico—CNPq’, Brazil, for financial support for the development of the research project from which this paper originated.
Notes
Latin phrase that denotes that something happens afterwards. In this context, it means that the analogy is generated after the teacher has constructed the conceptual framework for which it aims.
Each set of interviews occurred in a 3-week period, during which the content continued to be taught. So, the content that had been presented to each student before his/her interviews varied.
Sx and Sy are students from S3's class, but who have not participated in the interviews.
During the class, Sx had compared the overlapping of atomic levels with two fried eggs. According to him, in a given region, the egg whites would be mixed with each other.
Those figures represented the water molecule in three forms: a ball-and-stick model, a model with intersecting balls, and a model showing energy levels and electron sharing.
The physics teacher had informed the interviewer that those students had not studied magnetism at that school level, but that this topic was included in their science textbook.
It was presented in the sub-section Access.