Prior research on conceptual change has identified multiple kinds of misconceptions at different levels of representational complexity including false beliefs, flawed mental models, and incorrect ontological categories. We hypothesized that conceptual change of a mental model requires change in the "system of relations" between the features of the…

Cognitive scientists have studied internal cognitive structures, processes, and systems for decades in order to understand how they function in human learning. Nevertheless, questions concerning the diagnosis of changes in these cognitive structures while solving inductive reasoning tasks are still being scrutinized. This paper reports findings…

It is widely documented that the density property of rational numbers is challenging for students. The framework theory approach to conceptual change places this observation in the more general frame of problems faced by learners in the transition from natural to rational numbers. As students enrich, but do not restructure, their natural number…

In the present article, we argue that the conceptual change approach to learning can apply in the case of mathematics, taking into consideration the particular nature of mathematical knowledge and the neurobiological bases of mathematical cognition. In the empirical study that is reported in this article, we investigated ninth graders'…

Traditional assessment methods are not always suitable for diagnosing learners' knowledge structures at different levels of their expertise. This paper describes an alternative schema-based rapid assessment technique and its application in the area of arithmetic word problem solving. The technique is based on an assessment of the extent to which…

Existence of an academic self-schema was studied with 142 French eighth and ninth graders and 50 high school students. Both success and failure schemas appeared to exist, but the academic failure schema was only observed for the variable self-description time. (SLD)