Amy was a participant the Understanding Science project. She was interviewed when she had just started her A level (i.e. college) chemistry, and one of the topics that the course had started with was mass spectrometry. - (see Amy's account of mass spectrometry). Amy seemed to be unconvinced, or at least surprised by a number of aspects of the material she had learnt about the mass spectrometer. So, for example, she found it strange that iron could be vaporised:
I: So which bits of that are you not convinced about then?
(Pause, c.3 seconds)
A: It just all … I don’t, it’s not that I’m not convinced about it, it’s just sound strange, because it’s like, (pause, c.2s) erm, well this sounds like ridiculous but, like but before today like none of the people in out class had thought about iron being turned into a gas, and it’s little things like that which sound weird.
I: Okay, erm so if you said to people, can you turn water into a gas, most people would say.
A: Yeah.
I: Yeah, do it in the kettle all the time, sort of thing.
A: Yeah.
I: but if you said to people can you turn iron into a gas? – do people find that a strange idea?
A: Yeah.
I: Yeah?
A: Well we did. (She laughs)
Although Amy and her classmates had studied the states of matter years earlier at the start of secondary school, and would have learnt that substances can commonly be converted between solid, liquid and gaseous phases, their life-world (everyday) experience of iron the metallic material made the idea of iron vapour seem 'weird'. Given the prevalence of grounded learning impediment]s where prior learning interferes with new learning, this did not seem as "ridiculous" to the interview as Amy suspected it may appear. (See a similar report from another learner: Iron is too heavy to evaporate)
Return to ECLIPSE homepage
List of science topics
Dr Keith S Taber kst24@cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge Faculty of Education