Tao, Oliver, and Venville's paper addresses a debate between two hypotheses of children's development of conceptual understandings of the Earth. The authors aim to investigate whether culture influences students' conceptions of the Earth. However, one questionable assumption shared among conception and conceptual change studies is that researchers…

This paper provides a video-based learning process study that investigates the kinds of mental models of the atmospheric greenhouse effect 13-year-old learners have and how these mental models change with a learning environment, which is optimised in regard to instructional psychology. The objective of this explorative study was to observe and…

This study aimed to develop the small-scale experiments involving electrochemistry and the galvanic cell model kit featuring the sub-microscopic level. The small-scale experiments in conjunction with the model kit were implemented based on the 5E inquiry learning approach to enhance students' conceptual understanding of electrochemistry. The…

This article is concerned with "commonsense science knowledge", the informally gained knowledge of the natural world that students possess prior to formal instruction in a scientific discipline. Although commonsense science has been the focus of substantial study for more than two decades, there are still profound disagreements about its nature…

Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert…

Over the past three decades, science educators have accumulated a vast amount of information on conceptions--variously defined as beliefs, ontologies, cognitive structures, mental models, or frameworks--that generally (at least initially) have been derived from interviews about certain topics. During the same time period, cultural studies has…

One of the important phenomena observed in the learning of mathematics is compartmentalization. This phenomenon occurs when a learner has two different, potentially contradictory schemes in his or her cognitive structure; in a typical case, a student deals with the same mathematical concept in an inconsistent or incoherent way, or activates a less…

Using conceptual change as theoretical lens, describes the structure of (n=4) learners' conceptual ecology within biological evolution and illustrates how this ecology influences the process of conceptual change. Prior conceptions relate to evolutionary theory, scientific and religious orientations, view of biological world, and acceptance of…

Assesses the understanding that a sample of Oregon public school students (n=159) had of geology, physical and chemical characteristics, ecology, and natural resources as related to a marine environment. Results indicate that student understanding in some areas does not progress beyond the early grades and that the interdisciplinary approach of…

In this article, the meanings students construct and the conceptual advances they make as they deal with ratio and proportion problems are described. The study cites episodes with a second grader, two fifth graders, and three seventh graders. A critical factor in students' comprehension of and solution to ratio and proportion problems is their…

Reports on a study in which clinical interviews were conducted with three elementary school children to determine the extent to which they held naive misconceptions about important biological topics, and to determine agewise trends in the development of biological knowledge. (TW)

Propositions expressed by students during interviews prior to and after audiovisual instruction served as the basis for Concept Propositional Analysis (CPA) to assess cognitive structure. CPAs for two students are reported and aspects of Ausubelian principles are discussed. The method showed that new learning can be linked to previous…

Discusses children's ideas about colored objects and colored shadows, with special attention to the organization of these ideas into mental models. The clarification of these models provides instructional tools that serve to assess and confront students' naive conceptions. Subjects were visitors to a science museum who engaged in interactive…

This paper analyzes the misconceptions high school students have about force and suggests that the misunderstanding of Newton's third law is the key to these misconceptions. Clinical interview and diagnostic test data (N=104) indicates that many students have a naive view of force as an acquired or innate property of single objects rather than…

Structure of mathematical concept of multiplication and its integration into conceptual system, with respect to formal and informal aspects of understanding for 10 university students, are investigated through linear scale assessment of examples for prototypical effects and through follow-up interview which included direct explanations of…