This iMovie was made by Kyla Kennedy, Matt Kabler, Julie Koehn and Diana Jackson as they tried to address the misconceptions associated with acceleration due gravity. Preservice teachers each performed clinical interviews to assess students prior knowledge and prepared a series of lessons children's various preconceptions. This is not a trivial problem for a 3rd and 4th grade teachers to attempt. Rather, it requires a substantial amount of teacher knowledge in the areas of children's backgrounds, developmental appropriateness, pedagogical and content knowledge. Some students believed (as did Aristotle) that an object's speed will be dependent upon its mass or, as the children said, "heaviness". These teachers needed to directly address each of this belief as they established her problem, provided sufficient evidence for the scientific explanation, and scaffolded tasks and questions for students so that they could use the concept. These students taught in pairs in two different classrooms and compared whether events with ramps assisted children in accomodating the notion of constant acceleration due to gravity in addition to dropping objects of different masses.
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For more information, please contact Randy Yerrick at ryerrick@mail.sdsu.edu