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Chapter 8
Intuitions, Conceptions and Frameworks:
Modelling Student Cognition in Science
Learning
Keith S. Taber
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Modelling Student Cognition in Relation to Academic Learning
This chapter is about how researchers (and teachers) can model student cognition
to make sense of the learning and understanding of school and college subjects.
The premise of the chapter is that educational research into student learning has
produced a great deal of descriptive material about student ideas: but has been
hampered by a lack of understanding of the nature of what is studied. Familiar,
but central, terms—such as “knowledge”, “thinking”, “ideas”—tend to be poorly
defined, and the relationships between data elicited in studies and the entities
posited by researchers—such as “alternative conceptual frameworks” and “intuitive
theories”—have not always been convincing. However, it is argued here, that the
cognitive sciences (Gardner, 1977) increasingly offer useful conceptual tools to bet-
ter inform such research. Indeed, progress is leading to strong integration between
neuroscience and traditional work in experimental psychology (Goswami, 2008;
Pretz & Sternberg, 2005), such that knowledge of brain function and structure may
soon significantly inform educational practice (Goswami, 2006).
The context of much of the work discussed here is the learning of science sub-
jects, as there is an immense research base into student thinking and developing
understanding of science concepts (Duit, 2007). It seems highly likely, however,
that much of what has been found in this area is—at least generally—applicable
across other areas of “academic” learning. Indeed it is worth noting that whilst
science education has become established as something of a discrete field within
education (Fensham, 2004), the content of science learning is diverse—so that
understanding Hooke's law (based on a mathematical relationship), is rather dif-
ferent from understanding the nature of acidity or oxidation (historically shifting
concepts that are contingent upon chemists selecting to pay attention to particu-
lar patterns in material behaviour which offer particular utility value), and different
