Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
conception that the Earth is nearer the Sun during summer, which is accessed as
propositional knowledge. Such distinctions are not purely academic: in the latter
case answers on this topic are likely to be consistent, whereas in the former case,
modifying the question may sometimes lead to a different primitive intuition being
activated and a different answer generated. This model offers some explanatory
value in making sense of the disparate characteristics reported for students' ideas
in science.
Karmiloff-Smith also offers another possibility: that under some circumstances it
is possible to short cut the process by which we build implicit intuitions of the world
which through successive re-representation can become converted to directly acces-
sible representations of propositional knowledge. She suggested that we are able to
sometimes directly acquire knowledge at this level by interactions with others. This
is of course reassuring to those working in school systems where much of teaching
concerns presenting the concepts to be learned by verbalising propositional knowl-
edge. However, the mechanism is not limited to true information: a student could
through this mechanism learn the Earth is nearer the Sun during the summer if this
is suggested by a classmate.
Here Vygotsky's distinction between spontaneous and scientific/academic con-
cepts becomes very relevant. Vygotsky recognised the limitations of spontaneous
concepts that could not be directly verbalised and applied in principled ways; but
also that academic concepts would be rote learnt and meaningless unless related to
existing knowledge grounded in personal experience. For Vygotsky (1934/1994),
conceptual development was a process of developing linkage between these two
types of concepts so that spontaneous concepts become available to operate on
in principled ways, and academic concepts are understood (not just regurgitated).
Vygotsky put great stress on the way those with access to cultural tools such as
language could support the learning of the young during this process.
Conceptual Change
This brings us back to a pre-occupation of science education—how to bring about
conceptual change (Taber, 2009, pp. 280-298). The natural process of conceptual
development may well involve the slow building of explicit knowledge structures
by re-representing more intuitive cognitive elements: but what when this leads to
conceptions at odds with what teachers are asked to teach? Some approaches to
cognitive change are based on persuasion, but seem to suggest that the learner is
able to undergo conceptual change as a deliberate rational choice. It seems likely
that teaching that encourages metacognitive sophistication may indeed support such
processes in some cases. However, for those student conceptions that have been
found to be most tenacious, persuasion has limited effect.
Sometimes this can actually be explained on rational grounds—from the stu-
dents' perspective their own understanding is more coherent and has greater
explanatory power (Thagard, 1992). In other cases research suggests that funda-
mental ontological category errors have been made: so that the type of
process
the
