Aprendizaje del concepto de densidad: la comprensión de las relaciones entre las variables

Abstract

Density is an initial and basic concept for experimental sciences. Most research on the teaching and learning of density focuses on applications of the concept to other topics, such as buoyancy. A discussion is presented around the understanding of the concept of density, focusing on the relationships between the variables involved in its definition. The fundamentals are developed from defining four learning objectives on aspects of the concept. The results obtained from the application, to 72 Argentine students of the first year of university, of the questionnaire "Reasoning with Density" are shown and discussed. This questionnaire investigates the logical-mathematical relationships between the variables m, V and d. The results show that more than half of the students do not have a deep conceptual knowledge of density. The main difficulty lies in inverse proportionality tasks when they must qualitatively relate solute mass (extensive) and density (intensive) to determine which sample has a smaller volume.