Benchmarks for Science Literacy: Chapter 15 THE RESEARCH BASE

4 THE PHYSICAL SETTING

    4B) THE EARTH

Shape of the earth. Student ideas about the shape of the earth are closely related to their ideas about gravity and the direction of "down" (Nussbaum, 1985a; Vosniadou, 1991). Students cannot accept that gravity is center-directed if they do not know the earth is spherical. Nor can they believe in a spherical earth without some knowledge of gravity to account for why people on the "bottom" do not fall off. Students are likely to say many things that sound right even though their ideas may be very far off base. For example, they may say that the earth is spherical, but believe that people live on a flat place on top or inside of it--or believe that the round earth is "up there" like other planets, while people live down here (Sneider & Pulos, 1983; Vosniadou, 1991). Research suggests teaching the concepts of spherical earth, space, and gravity in close connection to each other (Vosniadou, 1991). Some research indicates that students can understand basic concepts of the shape of the earth and gravity by 5th grade if the students' ideas are directly discussed and corrected in the classroom (Nussbaum, 1985a).

Explanations of astronomical phenomena. Explanations of the day-night cycle, the phases of the moon, and the seasons are very challenging for students. To understand these phenomena, students should first master the idea of a spherical earth, itself a challenging task (Vosniadou, 1991). Similarly, students must understand the concept of "light reflection" and how the moon gets its light from the sun before they can understand the phases of the moon. Finally, students may not be able to understand explanations of any of these phenomena before they reasonably understand the relative size, motion, and distance of the sun, moon, and the earth (Sadler, 1987; Vosniadou, 1991).

Water cycle. Students' ideas about conservation of matter, phase changes, clouds, and rain are interrelated and contribute to understanding the water cycle. Students seem to transit a series of stages to understand evaporation. Before they understand that water is converted to an invisible form, they may initially believe that when water evaporates it ceases to exist, or that it changes location but remains a liquid, or that it is transformed into some other perceptible form (fog, steam, droplets, etc.) (Bar, 1989; Russell, Harlen, & Watt, 1989; Russell & Watt, 1990). With special instruction, some students in 5th grade can identify the air as the final location of evaporating water (Russel & Watt, 1990), but they must first accept air as a permanent substance (Bar, 1989). This appears to be a challenging concept for some upper elementary students (Sere, 1985). Students can understand rainfall in terms of gravity in middle school but not the mechanism of condensation, which is not understood until early high school (Bar, 1989).