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The present research tested the hypothesis that the reading of science text can create new misconceptions in students with incongruent prior knowledge, and that these new misconceptions will be similar to the fragmented and synthetic conceptions obtained in prior developmental research. Ninety-nine third- and fifth-grade children read and recalled one of two texts that provided scientific or phenomenal explanations of the day/night cycle. All the participants gave explanations of the phenomenon in question prior to reading one of the texts and after they read it. The results showed that the participants who provided explanations of the day/night cycle at pretest incongruent with the scientific explanation recalled less information and generated more invalid inferences. An analysis of the participants’ posttest explanations indicated that these readers formed new misconceptions similar to the fragmented and synthetic conceptions obtained in developmental research. The implications of the above for text comprehension and science education research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that it is fruitful to examine cognitive development from a domain-specific, conceptual change (CC) point of view, but that both domain-specific and domain-general approaches are necessary in order to understand how cognitive development happens. The article starts with a description of the framework theory approach to CC and an explanation of how this approach can account for students' difficulties in learning counter-intuitive science and math concepts. Framework theories do not seem to go away but continue to exist and interfere with access to scientific and mathematical concepts even in skilled adults. It is further argued that domain-general executive function abilities are involved in CC processes that require the inhibition of intuitive concepts embedded in framework theories. The article concludes with the suggestion that cognitive development may be seen from the lenses of dual-process theories and that the interactions between domain-specific CCs and domain-general processes may be responsible overtime for the development of new conceptual structures and new types of processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments we explored the instructional value of a cross‐domain mapping between “number” and “line” in secondary school students' understanding of density. The first experiment investigated the hypothesis that density would be more accessible to students in a geometrical context (infinitely many points on a straight line segment) compared to a numerical context (infinitely many numbers in an interval). The participants were 229 seventh to eleventh graders. The results supported this hypothesis but also showed that students' conceptions of the line segment were far from that of a dense array of points. We then designed a text-based intervention that attempted to build the notion of density in a geometrical context, making explicit reference to the number-to-points correspondence and using the “rubber line” bridging analogy (the line as an imaginary unbreakable rubber band) to convey the no-successor principle. The participants were 149 eighth and tenth graders. The text intervention improved student performance in tasks regarding the infinity of numbers in an interval; the “rubber line” bridging analogy further improved performance successfully conveying the idea that these numbers can never be found one immediately next to the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments used multiple methods—open-ended assessments, multiple-choice questionnaires, and interviews—to investigate the hypothesis that the development of students' understanding of the concept of real variable in algebra may be influenced in fundamental ways by their initial concept of number, which seems to be organized around the notion of natural number. In the first two experiments 91 secondary school students (ranging in age from 12.5 to 14.5 years) were asked to indicate numbers that could or could not be used to substitute literal symbols in algebraic expressions. The results showed that there was a strong tendency on the part of the students to interpret literal symbols to stand for natural numbers and a related tendency to consider the phenomenal sign of the algebraic expressions as their “real” sign. Similar findings were obtained in a third, individual interview study, conducted with tenth grade students. The results were interpreted to support the interpretation that there is a systematic natural number bias on students' substitutions of literal symbols in algebra. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present an empirical study that investigated seventh-, ninth-, and eleventh-grade students' understanding of the infinity of numbers in an interval. The participants (n = 549) were asked how many (i.e., a finite or infinite number of numbers) and what type of numbers (i.e., decimals, fractions, or any type) lie between two rational numbers. The results showed that the idea of discreteness (i.e., that fractions and decimals had “successors” like natural numbers) was robust in all age groups; that students tended to believe that the intermediate numbers must be of the same type as the interval endpoints (i.e., only decimals between decimals and fractions between fractions); and that the type of interval endpoints (natural numbers, decimals, or fractions) influenced students' judgments of the number of intermediate numbers in those intervals. We interpret these findings within the framework theory approach to conceptual change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we argue that both the cognitive and situative perspectives need to be modified to account for the empirical evidence on learning, taking as a central example the problem of knowledge transfer. Our proposal is that we need an approach that takes as a unit of analysis the individual in a constructive interaction with the world through a variety of mediated symbolic structures, some internal and some external, in rich sociocultural settings. This should be done without denying that knowledge can be represented in some form in the memory system. While internal mental structures are acceptable in this framework, concepts should not be seen as stable and unchanging but, rather, as flexible, malleable, and distributed. To explain conceptual change, we should allow for the possibility that what is already known can be radically restructured and that new, qualitative different structures emerge. Teaching for conceptual change, we argue, should utilize but cannot solely rely on cognitive apprenticeship types of methods. Attention must be paid to the appropriate design of curricula and to the acquisition of subject matter knowledge, together with the development of instructional methods that utilize sociocultural processes, like classroom discussion, to develop students' metaconceptual awareness and the ability to engage in intentional learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that concepts and categories are the building blocks of cognition. They allow us to interpret our experiences, to connect them to prior knowledge, to reason, and to make predictions. One could not imagine a theory of learning without a theory of concepts, and sure enough psychologists have been concerned about concepts and categories for a long time now. Pragmatism is the philosophical school that pays attention not to the logical antecedents of an argument but to its consequences. In the social sciences, this has been interpreted as a turn away from people's definitions of a situation to the consequences of the situation.

A theoretical framework based on cognitive/developmental research is described. It is argued that science learning is a gradual process during which initial conceptual structures based on children's interpretations of everyday experience are continuously enriched and restructured. Conceptual change also involves increased metaconceptual awareness, cognitive flexibility, and theoretical coherence. Some of the implications of this research for the development of science curricula and for instruction are discussed. It is also argued that while cognitive/developmental research can provide us with important information about the process of learning science, it does not provide much information about the external, environmental variables that can facilitate cognitive performance and conceptual change. What is needed in the future is the development of a theory of learning that bridges science education and cognitive/developmental research. Such a theory should specify the mechanisms that can take an individual from one level of cognitive performance to the next and relate them to situational and cultural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I explore the role that analogical reasoning plays in the developing thought of the child. Analogical reasoning is defined as the process of identification and transfer of a relational structure from a known system (the source) to a less known system (the target). This process is more general than metaphor and can apply even between systems that belong to the same category. I argue that this process is fundamental to the acquisition and use of external representational systems such as oral and written language, arithmetic, and music and is thus an important aspect of cognitive development. The acquisition and use of external representational systems depend on the identification of correspondences between the representational system and the physical and social environment or on the identification of correspondences among different representational systems. The acquisition and use of such systems also depend on the transfer of information from one representational system to another and on the evaluation of the applicability of the information transferred for the system concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphor comprehension is seen as an interactive process that takes place between a metaphorical linguistic input and the linguistic and situational context in which it occurs. Children are capable of using the information provided by the linguistic and situational context to make inferences about the meaning of metaphorical sentences. Context helps children decide when a linguistic input should be interpreted nonliterally and provides children with clues about the metaphor's implied meaning. It appears that young children can profit more from a situational context than a linguistic context in interpreting metaphors and that reliance on both the situational and linguistic contexts decreases with increases in the knowledge base. Further research is needed to clarify the processes whereby children use contextual information in order to construct the meaning of a metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that children's comprehension of nonliteral language is constrained primarily by epistemic, linguistic, and information-processing limitations. Some experimental evidence in support of this position is reviewed, and it is suggested that the linguistic form in which a nonliteral statement is expressed and the context in which it occurs can act on the linguistic and information-processing constraints and thus may facilitate or hinder comprehension. For example, it is easier for children to understand nonliteral statements when the statements are explicit (similes) rather than when they are implicit (predicative metaphors) or when they occur in predictable rather than unpredictable contexts, presumably because these statements reduce the information-processing load of the comprehension task and impose fewer demands on children's linguistic knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]