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The teacher might feel that the learner had grasped what scientists mean by the
concept label animal. However given a different set of examples, the same learner
may well have excluded from the category “animals”: humans (considered peo-
ple not animals); whale (considered a big fish—which it is not of course—not an
animal); a butterfly (considered an insect, or in the USA a “bug”, not an animal);
pigeon (considered a bird not an animal) and so forth. In this particular case it is
well established that the common taxonomic class of animal applied by most peo-
ple in everyday life does not fit with the scientific version. A teacher who was aware
of this would chose their examples accordingly, but no matter how many examples
we might use to test out a learners' application of a general concept, and no matter
how good the match between their discriminations and ours, we can never be certain
that the learner has “the same” concept that we do. This is of course just a specific
example of the fallacy of induction (Driver, 1983).
Conceptual Development
If
cognitive
development is primarily a matter of the unfolding of biological
potential triggered by interactions with the environment, then
conceptual
develop-
ment is basically due to learning which is contingent upon particular experiences.
Conceptual learning in science is considered a largely iterative process: where avail-
able mental structures are used to interpret experience, and are modified according to
that experience. This reflects the comments about Dewey's ideas above, and indeed
common thinking about learning in science education tends to be considered “con-
structivist” in the sense that Dewey, Piaget, Kelly and Vygotsky (among others)
are widely considered to be constructivist (Taber, 2009, pp. 22-33). That is, they
see the development of personal knowledge as basically a building process: using
existing knowledge as tools for forming new knowledge. This links too to the ideas
of Gagné (1970), but with the important difference that where Gagné encouraged
teachers to consider how the formal public knowledge structures of science are built
up into coherent networks of ideas, constructivists in science education have been
concerned with how learners tend to build up their own, often alternative, knowl-
edge structures. Such research is considered to
complement
conceptual analysis of
scientific knowledge in informing pedagogy.
Drawing upon Cognitive Science
Whilst science education researchers are in a strong position to explore and char-
acterise student thinking, many of the constructs used in the field are ambiguous.
Terms such as “alternative conception” are sometimes used to refer to a hypotheti-
cal mental structure, and are sometimes used to label the models researchers form
to summarise findings from different informants (Taber, 2009, 188). Where con-
ceptions (or intuitive theories or alternative frameworks or mini-theories, etc.) are
