ELEMENTARY SCIENCE TEACHER EDUCATION Framing Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Conceptions of Dissolving as a Ladder of Explanations Karthigeyan Subramaniam • Pamela Esprivalo Harrell Published online: 23 August 2013 Ó The Association for Science Teacher Education, USA 2013 Abstract The paper details an exploratory qualitative study that investigated 61 prospective teachers’ conceptual understanding of dissolving salt and sugar in water respectively. The study was set within a 15-week elementary science methods course that included a 5E learning cycle lesson on dissolving, the instructional context. Oversby’s (Prim Sci Rev 63:6–19, 2002, Aspects of teaching secondary science, Routledge Falmer, London, 2002) ladder of explanations for the context of dissolving, current scientific explanations for dissolving and perspectives on con- ceptions and misconceptions provided the unified framework for the study. Concept maps, interview transcripts, written artifacts, and drawings and narratives were used as data to investigate these prospective teachers’ conceptual understanding of dis- solving throughout the 15-weeks of the methods course. Analysis revealed that participants’ explanations of dissolving were predominantly descriptive explana- tions (39 %) and interpretative explanations (38 %), with lower percentage occur- rences of intentional (14 %) and cause and effect (9 %) level explanations. Most of these explanations were also constructed by a set of loosely connected and rein- forcing everyday concepts abstracted from common everyday experiences making them misconceptions. Implications include: (1) the need for science teacher edu- cators to use multiple platforms to derive their prospective elementary teachers’ conceptual understandings of science content; and (2) to identify and help them identify their own scientific conceptions and misconceptions and how they influence the construction of scientific/nonscientific explanations. Science teacher educators also need to emphasize the role of meaningful frameworks associated with the concept that is being introduced during the Engage phase of the 5E learning cycle. This is important because, relevant prior knowledge is associated with the K. Subramaniam (&) Á P. Esprivalo Harrell College of Education, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #310740, Denton, TX 76203-5017, USA e-mail: Karthigeyan.Subramaniam@unt.edu 123 J Sci Teacher Educ (2013) 24:1177–1199 DOI 10.1007/s10972-013-9356-x