Method for designing physics glossary

At the present stage of science and technology development a regular updating of educational material is compulsory. In fact, global updating of educational and reference material takes place less than 1 time per 10 years. Similar situation leads to the need for lifelong self-education. However, to understand educational and professional literature, it is necessary to know basic terms of the conceptual apparatus in a certain field of science. That is why various kinds of dictionaries, encyclopedias, glossaries are put in the forefront today. The analyses of existing glossaries both in Russia and abroad showed a number of defects including: definition insufficiency, absence of formulas, illustrations, examples, relation to a particular level of education that makes it limited for a certain grade of students and unavailable for others. To resolve these problems a set of universal requirements for designing glossaries were formulated, such as: free access to the glossary, universality for all groups of students, clarity of information at each level of training, irredundancy of information, usability of the glossary, availability of search and additional explanatory information, guidance for relationship of concepts. The article describes the three basic requirements, which are practically not realized in any of the existing glossaries: universality, completeness, relationship of concepts. Speaking about the universality of the glossary it is necessary to take into account that a certain field of knowledge is studied in various stages of learning. Thus, for example, physics is studied at school and university. However, it is necessary to formulate physical concepts in different ways as more new mathematical apparatus has been learnt at each stage of study. Thus, the concepts formulated for physics course of university level are not suitable for the seventh- graders. On the other hand, the formulation of concepts for the seventh-grader will be insufficient for the university student. That is why there must be the requirement for availability of the glossary for all levels of education; in this case the glossary should provide the information available for each appropriate level of education. This requirement may be implemented either by restricting access in accordance with the level of education or by offering the student a choice of level without limiting the access to higher levels. Nowadays any glossary is a list of definitions of discipline key concepts. This is not enough in the context of additional or self-education, so the main requirements for the glossary content (in natural sciences) were formulated: definition of a concept in accordance with the level of learning, relevant formulas, explaining pictures, examples of use of a phenomenon or object, background information (history, units, etc.) if available. The requirement for relationship of concepts in the glossary leads to the necessity to establish interrelated concepts and relations between them. It is convenient to use a semantic network to determine the structure of the glossary. Such semantic network consists of nodes which are concepts and arrows which are indicators of relationship between the concepts. The article shows an example of similar semantic network for physics course. The requirements formulated are generic and can be extended to any academic discipline, as well as any system based on the conceptual apparatus.

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