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Modelling Conceptual Learning

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Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education

Abstract

The chapter considers the suggestion that there is a learning paradox that undermines constructivist notions of learning, but suggests that this claim ignores the potential of emergent systems to give rise to new properties at higher levels of organisation. Drawing upon the analysis and models in earlier chapters, questions of how concepts are acquired, developed and related to each other are explored. Vygotsky’s notion of concept development is considered, and is modified through the introduction of the notion of melded concepts that result from the kind of interconceptualisation between spontaneous and academic concepts that he considered so central. Challenges in modelling conceptual development in science are illustrated by an analysis of two concepts where informal ‘life-world’ ideas stand in a different relationship to formal scientific ideas: energy (when some very common alternative conceptions are completely inconsistent with the accepted scientific concept) and metals (where there is considerable, but not complete, overlap between everyday, and indeed engineering, notions; and the formal concept developed in chemistry classes); and by considering how students’ manifold concepts may reflect the sequences of formal models met in learning about some science concepts. Ideas about types of conceptual change, and the conceptual ecology analogy, are explored in relation to the models developed in the book. It is mooted that worldview functions like a conceptual habitat within the conceptual ecology.

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  1. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Keith S. Taber

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Taber, K.S. (2013). Modelling Conceptual Learning. In: Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7648-7_15

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