Abstract
Some ways of looking at – and seeing – micro-organisms by lower secondary school pupils (ranging in age from 11 to 14) have been singled out by means of the administration of a questionnaire and by encouraging pupils to reason out their answers. The study confirms the need to induce pupils to express their prior knowledge in order to improve teaching; allows the collection of a number of very popular misconceptions (mould infecting food after it goes bad and why; micro-organisms travelling throughout the body and why; good and bad bacteria facing-off in combat in our body); and indicate mass media (mainly advertising spots and TV programmes) as pupils’ elective source of information in the absence of any contribution at Italian school
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Bandiera, M. (2007). Micro-organisms: Everyday Knowledge Predates and Contrasts with School Knowledge. In: Pintó, R., Couso, D. (eds) Contributions from Science Education Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5032-9_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5032-9_16
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