Junior secondary school students' conceptions about plate tectonics

ABSTRACT

There are ongoing calls for research that identifies students’ conceptions about geographical phenomena. In response, this study investigates junior secondary school students’ (N = 95) conceptions about plate tectonics. Student response data was generated from semi-structured interviews-about-instances and a two-tiered multiple-choice test instrument developed and validated by the researchers. There were three main findings: (1) students held many alternative conceptions about plate tectonics, most of which have not been reported in previous research; (2) students’ alternative conceptions most commonly concerned the formation of landforms at tectonic plate boundaries; and (3) students were particularly confused about the cause of subduction at an oceanic-continental convergent plate boundary. The findings of this study can assist geography teachers and researchers to develop innovative pedagogies that consider students’ pre-instructional alternative conceptions and promote conceptual change learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Plate tectonics
• geography
• alternative conceptions
• conceptual change
• mixed methods

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank to the Queensland College of Teachers for the provision of a grant that enabled the first author to present this research at the Australasian Science Education Research Association 2015 conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.