Overcoming Junior High School Students' Misconceptions About Microscopic Views of Phase Change: A Study of an Analogy Activity

This study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of an analogy activity, which was designed to overcome junior high students' misconceptions about the microscopic views of phase change. Eighty Taiwanese 8th graders were randomly assigned to either a control group or an experimental group. For the control group, the subjects were instructed through traditional teaching whereas for the experimental group, an analogy activity was conducted on students. This specific analogy activity was presented in the form of role-playing in which students acted as particles and worked together to perform the conditions of phase changes. Through analyzing these students' drawings of the atom arrangements for the three states of some substances, it was found that the students of experimental group, though in many cases, did not perform statistically better than did those of control group in an immediate posttest. The comparisons of a delay test between these two groups indicated that the analogy activity had clearly positive impacts on students' conceptual change on these scientific concepts in terms of long-term observations.