Özet:

Several researchas indicated that mental models can affect the students' ability to perform reasoning on external representations encountered. Students' mental models are generally used to thinking in problem solving. Objective of this research is to look at the characteristics of initial mental models of students in understand the concept of atomic structure. Research subjects taken from students of high schools in Lampung Indonesia that have been selected as the sample. The number of samples involved as many as 119 people consisting of students of class XI. Diagnostic tests in the form of an essay used to see the emergence of a mental model of atomic structure that is tested in Class XI. The results of the research show that for all groups of students' early knowledge, initial mental models of the students in understanding the concept of atomic structure is dominated by verbal mental model of the category "very bad" and "bad," or the characteristics of "unformed" and "intermediate 1" mental models. This finding implies that students' mental models can be used as a reference in determining the instruction strategies that can help students in problems solving related to the phenomenon sub-microscopic, macroscopic, and symbolic.

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