Abstract
The question addressed in the present article concerns the contextual character of students’ conceptions of cases of psysical motion. An interview investigation with students following the mechanical engineering line of study at Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden was carried out during the students’ first year of study, before and after their first course in Mechanics. In the interviews, the students were verbally presented with eight cases of physical motion, four before and four after the course. The analysis of the conceptualization of physical motion points clearly to the very restricted contextual character of the conceptions of the cases.
In previous research, the tradition of describing thinking and knowledge in terms of cognitive structures, shemas, models and so on, is very dominant. In relation to our results, one problem with the focus on cognitive structures is the assumptions made about generality across case or instances. Also, the students’ starting-point for their reasoning about the cases is not in any conceptual framework but in the specific cases. The conceptualizations are related to the students’ previous experiences rather than to any clearly delimited and structured conceptual framework.
Résumé
Le problème traité dans cet article concerne le caractère général ou contextuel des conceptions physiques qu’ont les étudiants à propos du mouvement. Des étudiants suédois sont interviewés au début de leurs études d’ingénieur, avant et aprés un cours de mécanique. Les entretients portent sur huit cas particuliers de mouvement; quatre sont présentés avant le cours et quatre aprés. L’analyse des conceptualisations avancées par les sujets met en évidence le caractère local et contextualisé de leurs explications.
Les travaux antérieurs mettaient l’accent sur des structures de connaissances générales, schémas, modèles mentaux etc… Nos résultats ne confirment pas l’hypothèse de structures cognitives qui offriraient un cadre de référence unique à l’interprétation de différents cas spécifiques de mouvements. En revanche les expériences antérieures des sujets, relativement à chaque cas présenté, constituent des connaissances auxquels ils font appels.
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The research reported here has been financially supported by grants from the Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleages.
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Svensson, L. The conceptualization of cases of physical motion. Eur J Psychol Educ 4, 529 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172715
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172715