Analysis of the Pre-service Chemistry Teachers' Cognition of the Nature of Model in the Design and Development Process of Models Using Technology: Focusing on Boyle's Law

The purpose of this study is to analyze the pre-service chemistry teachers’ cognition of the nature of model in process of designing and developing models using technology. For this purpose, 19 pre-service chemistry teachers’ in the 3rd grade of a education college located in the central region observe experimental phenomena related to Boyle's law presented in the 7th grade science textbook and researchers required the design and development of a model related to the observed experimental results using technology. Based on previous studies, the nature of model were classified into two aspect: ‘Representational aspect’ and ‘Explanatory aspect’. The ‘Representational aspect’ was classified into ‘Representation’, ‘Abstraction’, and ‘Simplification’, and the ‘Explanatory aspect’ was classified into ‘Analysis’, ‘Interpretation’, ‘Reasoning’, ‘Explanation’, and ‘Quantification’. The pre-service chemistry teachers’ cognition were analyzed by the classification. As a result of the study, the ‘Representation’ of the 'expressive aspect' was uniformized in the form of space that changes in volume, and the pressure was expressed as the Brightness inside the cylinder or frequency of color change of particles for ‘Abstraction’. In the case of ‘Simplification’, the particle collision was expressed as a perfectly elastic collision, but there was a group that could not simply indicate the type of particle. In the ‘Explanatory aspect’, in the case of ‘Analysis’, volume was classified as a manipulated variable, and in the case of ‘Interpretation’, most groups analyzed the change in pressure through the collision of gas particles. However, the cognition involved in ‘Reasoning’ was not observed much. In the case of ‘Explanation’, there were groups that did not succeed in explanation because the area where the particles collided was not set or incorrectly set, and in the case of ‘Quantification’, there was a group that formulated the number of collisions per unit time, and on the contrary, there was a group that could not quantify the number of collisions because they could not be expressed in numbers.