9–10-Year-Old Students' Ideas About Light as an Entity: Teaching Perspectives

The child, even when very young, has ideas about physical concepts and phenomena, and these ideas play a role in the learning experience. For the physicist, light is an entity that propagates in space from a source that interacts with objects it encounters in its path and then produces various perceptible effects. Data from relevant research shows that 4 to 12-year-old children have ideas that do not correspond to the school scientific models. In this research, we study the ideas of 9-to 10-year-old children about the concept of light. 134 primary school children (69 female and 65 male) participated in this study. The directive individual interview was the technique we used in our research. Results show that 9-10 years old children used different categories of light ideas. Article visualizations: