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posited as being located in learners' minds, it is often unclear what form they are
understood to take. Indeed it might be suggested that just as students often operate
with alternative technically dubious versions of science concepts, science education
researchers have been exploring students' ideas using conceptual tools that are in
their own way just as vague and imprecise as those of the students they are exploring.
Folk Psychology and Educational Research
In other words, educational research has often been based on a good understanding
of the science concepts students are asked to learn, and a strong familiarity with
the classroom context in which school and college learning takes place—but an
impoverished conceptual framework for interpreting cognition
. It may be ironic that
science educators have worked hard to shift teachers away from operating with a
“folk psychology” model of teaching (as the transfer of knowledge from teacher to
student), whilst carrying out their own research from a similar folk psychology base
(Taber, 2009, pp. 126-128).
For example such constructs as “ideas”, “beliefs”, “learning”, “understanding”,
“thinking” and “memory” have often been taken for granted in studies, rather than
seen as problematic to define and so recognise. This is not true of all studies, and
it is clearly recognised that in any research certain starting points have to be taken
as accepted givens. However, such implicit “taken-for-grantedness” may commonly
lead to confusing what a researcher interpreted as the meaning of a students' speech
utterance with what the student thought, and indeed then what they remembered and
so what they may be considered to know. That is not to suggest that such distinctions
are ever likely to be unproblematic in practice (Taber, 2009, 146), but lack of clarity
in researchers' accounts only increases the potential for confusion.
Such confusions have characterised the debate about the nature of students'
scientific thinking when different research evidence is drawn upon to argue that
learners' ideas are coherent or piecemeal; or are stable or labile, etc. Whilst it would
be naive to assume that this area of research can be significantly advanced by a
simple clarification of terminology and tightening of language, the cognitive sci-
ences, the “new science of mind”, is now sufficiently developed to offer a good
deal of valuable guidance (Gardner, 1977). The rest of this chapter will explain this
position with some examples.
Thinking, Knowing and Ideas
One central feature of any model of student cognition drawing upon the cognitive
sciences is the distinction between what a learner thinks (at any one time) and what
they can be considered to “know”. Thinking is a process, and the ideas that learners
have (and may then express) are products of that process. Thoughts are transient,
and draw upon both memory and immediately available perceptual information.
