Research

My master's research at the University of Georgia was an extension of my research at the University of San Carlos (2007). I studied how students use role-playing (i.e., using students to act out the roles of bulbs, voltage source, and electron; and cracker as energy) in learning the concept of Direct Current (DC) electric circuits. The latter study was conducted in a class of high school students at a state university in the Philippines while the former was conducted in a class of preservice middle school science teachers at a university in the south of the US. I found that both groups have misconceptions in electric circuits. Also, both groups enjoyed the role-playing as they were able to move around, discussed science concepts in groups, and got to eat crackers. I also found that the preservice teachers (1) demonstrated varied interpretations of a given analogy of electric current, (2) used alternative conceptions to reason about current electricity, (3) employed appropriate props in their role-playing, and (4) developed new analogies from role-playing. For my future research, I would like to study how robotics and role-playing may be embedded in a heat and temperature teaching sequence that employs several models on visualizing molecular behavior.