3. Method
3.1 Study participants
The participants for this study included three groups: geosciences students (GS), non- geosciences students (NGS), and geosciences teacher (GST). There were 47 geosciences students, 29 non- geosciences students, and 33 geosciences teachers participanted in this study. The participants ranged in age from 19 – 50 years old. The geosciences students are sophomore and junior at a public university in Northeastern region of Thailand and the non- geosciences students are also sophomore students at a public university in Western region of Thailand. The geosciences teachers are teaching in school in various provinces of Northeast Thailand ans they have teaching experience between 3 – 13 academic years.
3.2 An example of the change of Earth’s crust question item
In order to investigate participants’ conceptual understanding in the change of Earth’s crust concepts, conceptual question item on the Earth’s interior, the Earth’s crust, plate tectonic, and geological time was used to probe their existing understanding. Figure 1 shown an example of conceptual question item on the concept of movement of Earth’s crust, both English and Thai version.
Figure 1. An example of conceptual question item on the movement of Earth’s crust concept in the original GCI (left) and the revised Thai version (right)
3.3 Data collection and analysis
The conceptual test of the change of Earth’s crust was administerd to all participants and the participants were assigned to complete the test in 40 minutes. For investigating of the participants’ understanding of Earth’s interior concept, Earth’s crust, plate tectonic, and geological time, the obtained quantitative data was analyzed by arithmatics mean and standard deviation in order to explain conceptual mean score for each group. Finally, Wilcoxson signed-ranks test were conducted in order to compare the differences among geosciences and non- geosciences students and geosciences teachers.