Abstract
We all have the subjective experience of having ideas, but this chapter considers how we should think about the processes by which learners’ come to have ideas about the world. The nature of perception is considered, and how this necessarily involves a process of transforming information from the external world into a completely different form to allow processing in the nervous systems. Some of the known complications of human perception are discussed, such as the highly selective nature of attention, and the tendency for what is perceived to have been ‘patched-up’ by the cognitive apparatus before anything is made available to consciousness. In particular, it is emphasised how perception is an active process of processing raw data, in effect using ‘knowledge’ already represented in the system, leading to biases in perception. Ideas are mental events, and to ‘share’ them they must be expressed in public: this involves processes of representation. The evidence we have for someone else’s ideas is therefore indirect, as it relies upon how something only directly available to that person (an idea) has been represented as something necessarily quite different (such as a diagram or a gesture).
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Taber, K.S. (2013). The Learner’s Ideas. In: Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7648-7_4
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