9455613 Maloney This project will develop a one semester physical science course for non-science, especially elementary education, majors. This course represents an important element in IUPF's teacher preparation sequence. The course will be activity based with investigations and exercises designed to elicit students' common-sense ideas about the systems and situations, challenge those ideas where they disagree with the scientifically accepted ideas, and help the students construct a new understanding of the concepts, relationships and principles that apply. A limited set of investigative and reasoning processes, e.g., making observations and inferences, proportional reasoning, and drawing, reading and interpreting graphs, will be emphasized and used throughout the course. In order to get the students to engage in the appropriate reasoning, and to give them sufficient time to undergo conceptual change and construct a scientifically acceptable understanding, only selected concepts, principles, relationships, and topics will be explored. Several concepts and principles, e.g., area, volume, density, and conservation of mass, will be examined because of their importance in both chemistry and physics. In addition two fundamental topics, motion in a straight line and the basics of compound formation, will be studied to illustrate some of the contrasts between the two disciplines. The course materials will emphasize pattern finding and analysis and will be designed so that the students have to use qualitative means to work the tasks encountered.
