Conceptual change is the process by which concepts and the relationships between them change, either over an individual person's lifetime or over the course of history. It has been studied across cognitive psychology, cognitive developmental psychology, science education, and the history and philosophy of science, and the convergence of those fields has made conceptual change an interdisciplinary field of study in its own right. The field's understanding of how concepts shift was significantly shaped by Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and its account of paradigm shifts in scientific thought.
Facts
Core ClaimConceptual change is the process by which concepts and the relationships between them are restructured over the course of an individual's lifetime or over the course of history, studied across cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, science education and the history and philosophy of science. 1 FAQs
Why do students keep ideas that their science lessons contradict?
Students bring intuitive ideas about nature to class and assimilate new science into them, producing misconceptions.
Researchers in science education found that a main reason students find scientific concepts such as force and energy difficult is the intuitive concepts about the natural world that they bring with them into the classroom. Students tend to assimilate the scientific ideas they are taught into those existing concepts, which produces what are called misconceptions. For this reason, conceptual change research looks for instructional strategies that help students transform their intuitive concepts into more scientific alternatives, rather than simply adding new facts on top of the old ideas.
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Source Conceptual change (Wikipedia)
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1. Conceptual change (Wikipedia)
WikipediaOpening paragraph, first sentence
Conceptual change is the process whereby concepts and relationships between them change over the course of an individual person's lifetime or over the course of history.
Lead paragraph, education-level
Conceptual change is the process whereby concepts and relationships between them change over the course of an individual person's lifetime or over the course of history.
In Approach: Cognitivism, Lead paragraph
Research in four different fields, cognitive psychology, cognitive developmental psychology, science education, and history and philosophy of science - has sought to understand this process.
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