Building Formal Thinking with Pupils on Magnetic Phenomena in Conceptual Laboratories

Developing formal thinking and building conceptual knowledge as a background for formal interpretation of phenomena is one of the main challenges in teaching and learning physics. In the context of the experimental exploration of the electromagnetic phenomena, pupils’ conceptual referents and representations of the phenomena and their identification and exploration of conditions to produce electro-magnetic interactions are investigated through semi-structured interview in the framework of Conceptual Laboratories of Operative Exploration. The pupils construct global interpretations of phenomena starting from local interpretations of the single experiments and synthetizing them by means of building the formal abstract entities.