Research-Based Design and Validation of a Teaching/Learning Sequence on Surface Phenomena

In this paper, after a theoretical introduction about active learning and some of its pedagogical and cognitive psychology fundamentals, we discuss the design of a teaching/learning sequence on surface phenomena for high school students, inspired by the ideas proposed by inquiry and investigative based learning approaches. A good understanding of surface phenomena is relevant in Physics and other scientific and technical fields. This, and the acknowledgement that traditional teaching methods used to introduce the basic concepts related to this topic have often proved to be not very effective in captivating students’ interest and in favouring authentic understanding of the related physical content drove us in choosing this physics topic. Finally, we discuss some results of the pilot validation of the teaching/learning sequence with two groups of high school students.