The Use of the Constructivist Teaching Sequence (CTS) to Facilitate Changes in the Visual Representations of Fifth-Grade Elementary School Students: A Case Study on Teaching Heat Convection Concepts

Most primary school students, although they grasp the scientific concepts of heat convection at the macroscopic level, commonly fail to visualize those concepts. Therefore, our research aims to enact a constructivist teaching sequence (CTS) to restructure students' visualization changes, ultimately enabling them to synergize macroscopic and sub-microscopic levels of understanding and visual representation. This study has employed a case study, combining qualitative and quantitative data to obtain an in-depth explanation. The quantitative data represent the percentage of the students' visual representation category and their understanding of pattern changes before and after the intervention. Meanwhile, the ways students presented their thoughts about a concept based on their visual representation are presented via qualitative data. All data come from the participants, comprising 69 fifth-grade elementary school students at one public school in Indonesia. Our research findings show that students' understanding of heat convection at both macroscopic and sub-microscopic levels improved to scientific conception, after undertaking the learning process using CTS. In addition, the use of CTS fostered a level of visual representation change regarding "construction" that dominated compared with other approaches: students shifted their visual representations from the varying styles of undefined drawing (UD), non-microscopic drawing (NMD), or no drawing (ND), to partial drawing (PD) and scientific drawing (SD).