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Pupil's ecological reasoning with help of modeling tool

Published: 07 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Ecological concepts, and in particular population dynamics, has been found to be among the most difficult topics in biology. Some researchers pointed to students' relatively weak mathematical background as the main source of learning difficulties. This paper reports on an investigation of pupil's (n=73) reasoning about the ecological phenomena by using an iconic modelling tool, WorldMaker. The simulations eliminated the need for understanding of mathematical equations, and made the ecological concepts much more accessible to some children. However, many of the pupils reasoned from an anthropocentric perspective that obstructed their ability to predict ecological phenomena which requires systems thinking.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)Feedback Loop Reasoning and Knowledge Sources for Elementary Students in Three CountriesEURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education10.29333/ejmste/11258216:2Online publication date: 2020
  • (2008)A modelling tool to support children making their ideas workProceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children10.1145/1463689.1463759(218-225)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2008

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    IDC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Interaction design and children
    June 2006
    172 pages
    ISBN:9781450378086
    DOI:10.1145/1139073
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 07 June 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. ecological reasoning
    2. modelling
    3. population dynamics
    4. simulation

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    View all
    • (2020)Feedback Loop Reasoning and Knowledge Sources for Elementary Students in Three CountriesEURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education10.29333/ejmste/11258216:2Online publication date: 2020
    • (2008)A modelling tool to support children making their ideas workProceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children10.1145/1463689.1463759(218-225)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2008

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