The conception of position held by young adolescents (11-16 years old). An instructional proposal of position

Abstract

In this work, we analyse the different ways in which the subjects (11-16 years old) describe the position that an object occupies with respect to another used as reference. The results obtained concerning the way students conceptualise the position, together with the difficulties involved in teaching this concept, led us to propose an instructional domain based on the work of Fernández Durán, Jiménez Gómez y Solano (1997), which permits us to: a) define the basic concepts of kinematics; b) use the physical phenomenology as starting point to reach a logical-mathematical model of kinematics and, c) structure the knowledge spontaneously generated in the model currently used for teaching kinematics.