Description:
This exploratory research has three purposes: (a) to identify which air pressure activities students (teachers and preservice teachers) find most fun and least fun, (b) to determine for these two groups of activities the likelihood that teachers will do the activities in their classroom and whether they will do them as hands-on activities or as demonstrations, and (c) to look for common characteristics and differences among the activities the students chose as most fun and least fun. Undergraduate and master students participated in hands-on learning stations and discrepant event demonstrations in the science methods course. An activity rating scale and students’ journals was used as a source of data. The analysis of the journals indicated that students have naïve conceptions about the physical properties of air. It was surprising to find that students rated as the most fun, many activities that they watched rather than did themselves. The fun element seemed to be mostly related to how discrepant the activity was for them. The students said they would implement most of the activities in their own classrooms, but there did not seem to be a relationship between how the activities were done in the class, their ratings of fun, and whether they would implement as hands-on activities or as demonstrations. The students seemed to look primarily at safety issues (flames and glass lab equipment) and messiness in deciding that a demonstration was better.