Vol. 6 No. 1

Special Issue: Conceptual Change

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Guest Editors' Introduction

Articles

Guest Editors' Introducation

Ashwin Ram, Nancy J. Nersessian, and Frank C. Keil

Conceptual change continues to be a central concern of many of the disciplines that participate in the learning sciences. In this issue of The Journal of the Learning Sciences, as in the field, the topic is studied from a variety of perspectives. Cognitive development has been concerned with the nature of children's concepts, how they relate to adult concepts, and how they change over the developmental process. Philosophical and historical research on scientific conceptual change has investigated how new conceptual structures are constructed in a scientific community and come to replace existing ones and has discussed the implications of conceptual change for understanding the nature and development of scientific knowledge. Research in science learning has been concerned with the nature of students' intuitive concepts and the role they play in impeding or facilitating learning a science and with developing pedagogical strategies to facilitate the change from intuitive to scientific understanding. Artificial intelligence researchers have been creating computational models of conceptual and representational change. In all of these fields, there is considerable debate as to what constitutes conceptual change and how significant it is to understanding development, science, and learning.

This special issue brings together a variety of perspectives and approaches addressing common fundamental problems to conceptual change: What it is, how it occurs, and how to facilitate it........

Read more of the "Guest Editors' Introduction" in JLS Volume 6, Number 1.


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Abstracts

Analogical Reasoning and Conceptual Change: A Case Study of Johannes Kepler

Dedre Gentner, Sarah Brem, Ronald W. Ferguson, Arthur B. Markman, Bjorn B. Levidow, Phillip Wolff, and Kenneth D. Forbus

The work of Johannes Kepler offers clear examples of conceptual change. In this article, using Kepler's work as a case study, we argue that analogical reasoning facilitates change of knowledge in four ways: (a) higlighting, (b) projection, (c) rerepresentation, and (d) restructuring. We present these four mechanisms within the context of structure-mapping theory and its computational implementation, the structure-mapping engine. We exemplify these mechanisms using the extended analogies Kepler used in developing a causal theory of planetary motion.


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Conceptual Change and Wine Expertise

Gregg E. A. Solomon

Two studies explore conceptual change in the acquisition of wine expertise. In Experiment 1, tasters described a set of wines. Experts described the wines using more specific features than did intermediates, who, in turn, used more specific features than did novices. Specificity in describing wines was not related to discrimination performance on a psychophysical test. A regression analysis indicated that the features identified by the expert as well as those identified by the nonexpert tasters covaried with grape type, such that wines of the same grape were described more similarly than were wines of different grapes. In Experiment 2, the same tasters sorted the wines into clusters. Experts, unlike nonexperts, tended to sort the wines explicitly by grape type. Moreover, the features of the wines (described by the tasters in Experiment 1) covaried significantly better by the experts' clusters than they did by the nonexperts' clusters. Indeed, the features identified by the nonexperts covaried significantly worse when the wines were clustered by their own sortings than they did when the wines were clustered by actual grape type. It is suggested that the acquisition of wine expertise, a domain that is at once conceptual and perceptual, entails not only a greater differentiation of features but also a restructuring of the explicit schemes of classification.


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The Role of Extreme Case Reasoning in Instruction for Conceptual Change

Aletta Zietsman and John Clement

Although it is common to see extreme case reasoning included in lists of expert heuristics for problem solving, little work has been reported on the role that extreme cases can play in learning that leads to conceptual change. Evidence is presented from video tapes of think-aloud tutoring sessions to document the learning from extreme cases in a unit about levers for seventh graders. The observations support the view that one role of extreme cases is to provide a firm data point or comparison that helps students to establish an ordinal relation between two given variables. Two new additional roles for extreme cases in fostering learning are also identified: (a) their role in activating an intuition, often in the form of a perceptual motor schema, that is used in constructing an imageable, intuitively, grounded, explanatory model as opposed to an empirical rule; and (b) their role in facilitating the formation of new causal variables. Pending confirmation of similar effects in other subject areas, these roles are candidates for being included in a set of general learning strategies for science instruction. This illustrates the function that "learning-aloud" studies can play in documenting new types of learning processes and instructional strategies. The study highlights the importance for instructional design of research that uncovers students' existing knowledge structures and natural reasoning processes. The study suggests that explanatory model construction, causal relation construction, and concept formation can result from such instructional designs. The extent to which these three outcomes are evidence for strong conceptual change is also discussed.

The use of extreme cases as a reasoning strategy by experts has been documented in historical studies (Nersessian, 1992) and expert thinking-aloud studies (Clement, 1989, 1991). The use of extreme case reasoning as an instructional strategy is not as well documented (for an exception, see Zietsman & Hewson's 1986, description of computer-based instruction that uses extreme cases in dissonance generating situations). This article examines the ways in which extreme case reasoning facilitated learning in a study of students' learning about levers. The purpose of this article is to use qualitative analysses of tutoring transcripts as an empirical base to develop ground hypotheses for thinking about the roles extreme cases can play in learning and teaching.

The context of this study is a broader program of research and development in which the major goals are to :

  1. Identify students' persistent misconceptions, or alternative conceptions as we prefer to call them, that conflict with currently accepted theory.
  2. Identify students' positive preconceptions, or anchoring ideas as we call them, that are largely in agreement with the scientist's ideas.
  3. Build on the students' positive preconceptions in designing experimental lessons that deal with their alternative conceptions.
  4. Use tapes of tutoring trials with the lessons to criticize and improve them.
  5. Analyze the processes occurring in successful lessons to develop more general models of learning and teaching principles.

This article is structured as follows. We first review descriptions from prior research of different mechanisms by which extreme cases may contribute to thinking. We next give an overview of the design of the tutoring study and then present protocol evidence to illustrate students' learning. Finally, in our discussions of student learning, we concentrate on the following two issues: (a) asking whether the extreme cases in an experimental lesson on levers facilitated learning and (b) constructing hypotheses grounded in case study data that explain how the extreme cases facilitated learning.


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Dynamic Science Assessment: A New Approach for Investigating Conceptual Change

Shirley J. Magnusson, Mark Templin, and Robert A. Boyle

Starting from the premisse that understanding conceptual change requires studying it whle it occurs, this article describes a new research methodology in which students' knowledge is assessed in the context of mediated learning situations that attempt to foster conceptual change. The methodology builds on two ideas: that conceptual change in science is a matter of appropriation by individuals of culturally based knowledge (of the scientific community), and that understanding such change requires a mediated context in which the students' activity (actions and thinking) is shaped by a more experienced other who reflects the cultural norms or ideals of the scientific community that facilitate knowledge production. Specific assessments developed with these ideas in mind, which we call dynamic science assessments (DSAs), function to determine students' potential to change their understanding and as a result inform us about the process of conceptual change toward scientific knowledge. Results of a DSA about electricity that we conducted with upper elementary school children (n=28) indicated that it was possible to foster conceptual change and to discriminatee children with respect to their potential to develop scientifically accurate conceptions of current and resistance. These findings indicate the promise of using mediated learning situations, such as a DSA to study conceptual change in science, and we discuss the direction of future work given the conservative mediation in the assessments conducted in this particular instance.


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