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teacher means by “heat” or “light” is just totally incompatible with the type of stuff
the student understands “heat” or “light” to be (Chi, 1992). Research suggests in
these cases the teacher really needs to start again and help build an alternative under-
standing from scratch, rather than challenge the students' ideas: that is the teacher
needs to help the student acquire a totally new concept.
The knowledge-in-pieces approach based on diSessa's work suggests that at
least with some concept areas a better knowledge of students' repertoires of intu-
itive knowledge elements will allow teachers to deliberately channel learning by
building—and sometimes re-building—conceptual knowledge upon the most help-
ful intuitions in terms of match to desired target knowledge (Hammer, 2000). So
thinking about the seasons in terms of throwing balls at targets at different angles
to the direction of throw might activate suitable intuitions, rather than thinking in
terms of getting closer to a fire.
Towards a Model of Cognition that Supports Research
into Student Learning
This chapter has done little more than offer an overview of an interesting research
issue in education, and a glimpse of how cognitive science can support our research
into classroom learning and teaching.
The issue—deriving from science education but likely equally relevant in other
subject areas—was the nature of learners' ideas in science. In particular, how several
decades of work exploring student thinking and understanding of science concepts
has led to an eclectic range of findings. Research has characterised learners' ideas
along a range of dimensions (Taber, 2009, pp. 226-256), so that they:
may reflect or contradict target knowledge in the curriculum;
may be recognised as fanciful or conjectural, or may be the basis of strong
commitments;
may be labile and readily “corrected” or tenacious and resistant to teaching;
may be highly integrated into complex frameworks or may be isolated notions
with limited ranges of convenience;
may be inconsistent, or show high levels of coherence across broad domains;
may be unitary or manifold.
For a time, this led to much debate about which characterisations were actually
correct. However, as research in science education has increasingly drawn upon
ideas from cognitive science, it has become much clearer why thinking elicited
from science students has such variety. A cognitive system with different types
of knowledge elements at different levels of explicit access; a limited working
memory; a long-term memory system that necessarily has to represent ideas in a
physical substrate; etc., starts to explain why students sometimes offer inconsistent
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