Student Misconceptions about Heat Transfer Mechanisms: An Island Ethnophysics Study

Learners’ conceptual frameworks vary greatly, but they develop from their everyday experiences over time and change as they mature. Their intuitive understanding of the world around them often needs to match scientific concepts as seen by experts. It is essential in culturally based teaching to recognize how these naïve conceptions differ from scientific explanations of concepts and why children construct these ideas. Heat transfer mechanisms are conceptually rich material. Particularly in the Indonesian context, little effort has been made to reduce misconceptions. This prompted us to conduct a study in this area. We present a study on students’ misconceptions about heat transfer mechanisms, namely conduction, convection, and radiation. This study aimed to analyze students’ misconceptions about heat transfer mechanisms through an ethnophysics study. The method used was a non-experimental quantitative case study. In addition, a survey was conducted in the form of a diagnostic test in the form of questions related to heat transfer for 100 students. The findings in the field show that students experience relatively high misconceptions. So far, teachers have not accustomed students to learning from contextual things in the form of local wisdom around them. They have given scientific questions to search for, find, and provide answers and solutions to these natural phenomena. The teacher mainly pursues cognition and physics problems in textbooks and less explores contextual matters. Future research is suggested to develop physics teaching materials based on local wisdom oriented to 21st-century life skills that can support students to live in the future. Keywords: student misconceptions, heat transfer mechanisms, island ethnophysics