The effect of web based interactive instruction based on conceptual change approach for overcoming university students? misconceptions about heat and temperature

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of web based interactive instruction, which was based on conceptual change approach, for overcoming misconceptions about heat and temperature. Pre-test post-test design with control group was used for measurement of instruction?s effect.To experiment group experiments? video clips were used in instruction. These clips consist of two parts: introduction part and result part. Introduction part includes experimental equipments and design of experiment. Result part includes result of the experiment.Instruction contains several steps for overcoming each misconception. Number of these steps depends on whether students have misconceptions or not. If students have no misconception, instruction?s length and number of steps will be minimal. If students have all listed misconceptions, instruction?s length and number of steps will be maximal. Sequence of these steps is as follows: At Step 1; students watch instruction part of digital video clip without watching the result part. In this step, students also predict the result of the experiment by answering a multiple-choice question. At Step 2; students answer second multiple-choice question about the reason of their prediction at the first step. After this step interactive part of instruction begins. At Step 3a (True Prediction and Reason); students watch the whole video clip of experiment and congratulation message appears on screen. At Step 3b (False Prediction and Reason); students watch the whole video clip of experiment. In this way students accept that their predictions aren?t true. After this step to change their misconceptions some textual explanations will appear on screen. Depending on misconception?s type, students will answer small multiple choice questions as extra steps. At Step 3c (True Prediction and False Reason); students watch the whole video clip of experiment. Congratulation message for their true prediction appears on screen but for false reason textual explanations appear on screen as such in Step 3b. At the end of this step daily life examples are shown too. These steps are repeated for all misconceptions and students follow the process individually on the computer.11 three-tier questions were chosen from Heat and Temperature Concept Test and revised them according to our purpose. After reliability analyses it was used as pre-test and post-test. In pre-study number of physics teacher candidates was 40 and investigated nine different misconceptions. After revising the instruction number of physics teacher candidates was 35 (21 students as control group, 14 students as experiment group). Difference between pre-test and post-test results was significant.Key Words: Misconception, conceptual change, heat and temperature, interactive and web based