3. Process and experimental design
In sciences mass,volume,and densityare often considered to be obscured notions,causing not only difficulties in the learning process but
also misconceptions to the fifth grade students. Researchers (Adey & Shayer, 1988; Smith et al,1985) have already pointed out the problems
that students at that age confront as they find it difficult to differentiated the concepts of size, weight, mass, volume and lastly density. A
difficulty with the concept of density is that there is no direct way of measuring it. Although children from nine years old may get a global
notion of ’heaviness’,the quantification of density does require that twovariables (mass and volume)are first differentiated and thenrelated
to each other. Basically in the fifth grade they attempt to calculate densities numerically or realize that there is a unique number which de-
fines the density of a substance under standard conditions.