摘要：The present study investigates the effect of three neo-Piagetian constructs, namely Formal Reasoning (FR), Field Dependence/ Independence (FDI) and Divergence (DIV), as well as the effect of age and gender, on students’ portrayed representations of the atomic structure, taking into account their degree of coherence. For this purpose students’ representations were examined for their consistency across three task contexts, using Latent Class Analysis (LCA), in order to identify distinct latent classes of participants providing specific consistent representations. Participants (n=421) were students of the grades 8th, 10th and 12th of secondary education. LCA led to three clusters, in each of which, students’ responses demonstrated a consistency across tasks, with Bohr’s model, Nuclear model and Particle model, respectively. LCA with the covariates provided evidence for the association of the three cluster-memberships with the neo-Piagetian variables and age, while no effect of gender was found. Implications for science education are also discussed.
关键词：Atomic structure; Representations; Latent Class Analysis; Cognitive variables.
