Indeed, many science educators believe a key to promoting conceptual change in the classroom is through creating a more reflective classroom discourse.
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Conceptual Change The term conceptual changerefers to the development of fundamentally new concepts, through restructuring elements of existing concepts, in the course of knowledge acquisition.
A challenge for conceptual-change researchers is to provide a typology of important forms of conceptual change.
Conceptual change is difficult under any circumstances, as it requires breaking out of the self-perpetuating circle of theory-based reasoning, making coordinated changes in a number of concepts, and actively constructing an understanding of new (more abstract) conceptual systems.
Case studies of conceptual change in the history of science and science education reveal that new intellectual constructions develop over an extended period of time and include intermediate, bridging constructions.
The instructional process to facilitating conceptual change must therefore: 1) identify and address students' alternative conceptions, 2) provide opportunities for students' ideas to evolve, and 3) enable students' new ideas to be applied in a context familiar to them.
Teachers help their students build understanding of complex scientific concepts by disassembling the concept into component parts according to the level of intellectual development of their students.
Conceptual change often takes the form of theory change, because concepts are considered to be embedded in theories; changing one core concept in a theory generates changes in related concepts and eventually leads to a change in the whole set of concepts.
Concept linking activities: Invite students to take the role of a specific concept explored in a unit, and ask them to sit in a circle of four or five people, each representing a different concept. They then make connections to each other, explaining how and why they connect using evidence from prior learning.
Conceptual Learning involves students engaged in quality learning experiences based around key concepts and central ideas rather than using the more traditional method of focusing on learning on topics.
Conceptual change is a particularly profound kind of learning–it goes beyond revising one's specific beliefs and involves restructuring the very concepts used to formulate those beliefs. Explaining how this kind of learning occurs is central to understanding the tremendous power and creativity of human thought.
The definition of conceptual is something having to do with the mind, or with mental concepts or philosophical or imaginary ideas. An example of conceptual is when you formulate an abstract philosophy to explain the world which cannot be proven or seen.
When prior knowledge is accurate, rich and well-organized, it can help students learn and retain new information. By asking learners to build on their understanding, we can situate what we are teaching them in the context of the relevant knowledge they already have.
Inaccurate knowledge does not support new learning.
Unfortunately, misconceptions tend to be difficult to change once they are connected to other concepts or misconceptions – creating a flawed mental model of the set of concepts. In that case, multiple misconceptions need to be addressed prior to any new learning of the material.
What makes conceptual change so challenging to understand is that it cannot occur in this way . The concepts of a new theory are ultimately organized and stated in terms of each other, rather than the concepts of the old theory, and there is no simple one-to-one correspondence between some concepts of the old and new theories. By what learning mechanisms, then, can scientists invent, and students comprehend, a genuinely new set of concepts and come to prefer them to their initial set of concepts?
The term conceptual change refers to the development of fundamentally new concepts, through restructuring elements of existing concepts, in the course of knowledge acquisition. Conceptual change is a particularly profound kind of learning–it goes beyond revising one's specific beliefs and involves restructuring the very concepts used to formulate those beliefs. Explaining how this kind of learning occurs is central to understanding the tremendous power and creativity of human thought.
Most theorists agree that one step in conceptual change for both students and scientists is experiencing some form of cognitive dissonance–an internal state of tension that arises when an existing conceptual system fails to handle important data and problems in a satisfactory manner. Such dissonance can be created by a series of unexpected results that cannot be explained by an existing theory, by the press to solve a problem that is beyond the scope of one's current theory, or by the detection of internal inconsistencies in one's thinking. This dissonance can signal the need to step outside the normal mode of applyingone's conceptual framework to a more meta-conceptual mode of questioning, examining, and evaluatingone's conceptual framework.
Conceptual change is difficult under any circumstances, as it requires breaking out of the self-perpetuating circle of theory-based reasoning, making coordinated changes in a number of concepts, and actively constructing an understanding of new (more abstract) conceptual systems. Students need signals that conceptual change is needed, as well as good reasons to change their current conceptions, guidance about how to integrate existing conceptual resources in order to construct new conceptions, and the motivation and time needed to make those constructions. Traditional education practice often fails to provide students with the appropriate signals, guidance, motivation, and time.
Examples include the emergence of Darwin's concept of evolution by natural selection, Newton's concepts of gravity and inertia, and the mathematical concepts of zero, negative, and rational numbers. One of the challenges of education is how to transmit these complex products of human intellectual history to the next generation of students.
In analogical reasoning, knowledge of conceptual relations in better-understood domains are powerful sources of new ideas about the less-understood domain. Analogical reasoning is often supported by imagistic reasoning, wherein one creates visual depictions of core ideas using visual analogs with the same underlying relational structure. These depictions allow the visualization of unseen theoretical entities, connect the problem to the well-developed human visual-spatial inferencing system, and, because much mathematical information is implicit in such depictions, facilitate the construction of appropriate mathematical descriptions of a given domain. Thought experiments use initial knowledge of a domain to run simulations of what should happen in various idealized situations, including imagining what happens as the effects of a given variable are entirely eliminated, thus facilitating the identification of basic principles not self-evident from everyday observation.
Learning science for most students involves a process of conceptual change. Anderson and Roth (in press) note that students who achieve an understanding of a scientific topic successfully integrate accurate scientific knowledge with their own personal knowledge of the world. Research suggests, however, that many students fail to do this; instead, they view scientific knowledge as being separate and distinct from their personal knowledge. For these students science is merely a compilation of strange, obscure facts rather than a system of conceptual schemes for understanding their environment.
The generative model for teaching/learning acknowledges a constructivist approach to the process of learning. That is, students construct meaning from their experiences. This is precisely how Piaget viewed the process or learning (1929/1969). Piaget referred to the process of acquisition and incorporation of new data into an existing structure as "assimilation" and the resulting modification of that structure as "accommodation." In learning science then, the new facts, ideas, and concepts that are acquired gain more meaning by being organized (assimilated) into a cognitive structure; at the same time, the existing cognitive structure is given further clarification and support, or perhaps even changed, by incorporating new information (accommodating itself to the new data). The instructional process to facilitating conceptual change must therefore: 1) identify and address students' alternative conceptions, 2) provide opportunities for students' ideas to evolve, and 3) enable students' new ideas to be applied in a context familiar to them.
For this reason, Ausubel contends that, "The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows." Ausubel also commented on the importance of preconceptions in the process of learning, noting that they are "amazingly tenacious and resistant to extinction...the unlearning of preconceptions might well prove to be the most determinative single factor in the acquisition and retention of subject-matter knowledge."
Teachers who effectively implement the GLM promote a learning environment that engages students in an active search and acquisition of new knowledge. Learning is characterized by a process of interaction between the student's mind and the stimuli providing new information. Such a learning environment enables students to modify their existing cognitive structures. Students experience a dynamic interaction between their preconceptions and the appropriate scientific conceptions.
And, long before children begin the process of formal education, they attempt to make sense of the natural world. Thus, children begin to construct sets of ideas, expectations, and explanations about natural phenomena to make meaning of their everyday experiences. The ideas and explanations that children generate form a complex framework for thinking about the world and are frequently different from the views of scientists. These differing frameworks are referred to in the literature as misconceptions, alternative conceptions, or alternative frameworks. Since the early 1970s, research in science education and cognitive science has enriched our understanding of the importance of the ideas and explanations that students possess prior to instruction. This research has direct implications concerning the nature of learning science, as well as the process of teaching science.
Perhaps the most comprehensive interdisciplinary assessment of children's conceptions of science is the Learning in Science Project in New Zealand (Osborne & Freyberg, 1985). The following examples, from the work of the Learning in Science Project, exemplify conceptions that children ages 5 to 18 possess on a variety of topics, while contrasting those views with the scientific perspective.
traditional instruction (rote learning) will not lead to substantial conceptual change, and