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. Research in four different fields – cognitive psychology, cognitive developmental psychology, science education, and history and philosophy of science - has sought to understand this process. Indeed, the convergence of these four fields, in their effort to understand how concepts change in content and organization, has led to the emergence of an interdisciplinary sub-field in its own right. This sub-field is referred to as "conceptual change" research.
Origins
Cognitive psychologists studied the process of conceptual change and its two counterpoints: Closed-mindedness: The reluctance to consider ideas which conflict with one's own established beliefs. Belief perseverance: The tendency to cling to such ideas even after they have suffered decisive refutations. For instance, in the 1950s, Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter joined a cult whose members shared the belief that the world would end on December 21, 1954. After the prediction failed, most believers still clung to their earlier conceptual framework. Subsequent investigations confirmed and amplified the results of these initial experiments. Within cognitive developmental psychology, the interest in conceptual change was motivated by problems identified in the stage theory of cognitive development proposed by Jean Piaget.Carey, S. (1985). Are children fundamentally different kinds of thinkers and learners than adults? In S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal, and R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piaget claimed that the developing child passed through a series of four distinct stages of thought and that concept development reflected these broad transitions between stages. However, it increasingly became apparent that children's conceptual development was best described in terms of distinct developmental trajectories for each conceptual domain considered (e.g. knowledge about number, knowledge about the motion and interaction of inanimate objects, and knowledge about goal-directed intentional entities). The term "conceptual change" was increasingly used as work on these distinct developmental trajectories led to the discovery that a variety of types of changes occur in the content and organization of concepts.
In parallel, researchers in science education were learning that one of the main reasons students often found scientific concepts like force and energy difficult to understand was the intuitive concepts about the natural world that students brought with them to the classroom.Driver, R. & Easley, J. (1978). Pupils and paradigms: a review of literature related to concept development in adolescent science students. Studies in Science Education, 5, 61-84.Novick, S. & Nussbaum, J (1981) Pupils' understanding of the particulate nature of matter: a cross age study. Science Education, 65, 187-196. It became clear that students were assimilating the scientific ideas presented to them in the classroom into their existing concepts, resulting in what came to be referred to as "misconceptions". Researchers in science education turned to the task of identifying these pre-instruction ideas and sought instructional strategies that would succeed in helping student transform their intuitive concepts into more scientific alternatives.
These developments in cognitive studies of resistance to conceptual change, cognitive developmental psychology and science education occurred against a background of (and were influenced by) developments within the history and philosophy of science. Arguably, most important was the novel approach to how scientific concepts and theories change over the course of history put forward by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. In this book, Kuhn argued that changes in the scientific understanding of the natural world should not be seen as a gradual, incremental progress toward ever better understanding. He pointed out that it is sometimes very difficult to characterize how a more recent concept is better than a predecessor. The reason for the difficulty is that the successive concepts are embedded in a distinct set of relationships with other concepts and investigative techniques. Thus, the content of the two concepts and relationships to others can be so different that it is inappropriate to compare the two successor concepts directly with one another. An important concept to emerge from this reasoning was the idea of a "paradigm." Commentators have noted that Kuhn used the term in a number of different senses. However, one sense seems to have had the most influence on what came to be referred to as "conceptual change research." That is, the idea of a "paradigm" understood as an integrative set of theoretical concepts and methods taken for granted by a particular research community. According to Kuhn, most of scientists' work is conducted within a paradigm (what Kuhn called "normal science"). Occasionally, however, insurmountable problems lead scientists to question the paradigm's assumptions, and a new paradigm emerges (what Kuhn called "a paradigm shift").
Kuhn's work, and that of other philosophers and historians of science, had a substantial influence on cognitive developmental and science education research.Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education 66(2), 211-227. Increasingly, human beings' concepts were seen as embedded within their own set of relationships with other concepts and the process of conceptual change came to be seen as a kind of paradigm shift.
Emerging theoretical perspectives and recent developments
The claims about concept and theory change made by philosophers and historians of science served as a source of hypotheses about conceptual change occurring or failing to occur in everyday life, during child development, and in the classroom. These initial hypotheses served as the driving force for much theoretical and empirical research. A number of perspectives on conceptual change have emerged, and proponents have been engaging in a lively debate since the early 1980s.
One perspective views the process of conceptual change as "theory change".Carey, S. (1999). Sources of conceptual change. In E. K. Schlonick, K. Nelson, S. A. Gelman & P. H. Miller (Eds.), Conceptual development: Piaget's legacy, (pp.293-326). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.McCloskey, M. (1983). Naive theories of motion. In D. Gentner & A. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models (pp. 75-98). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Smith, C. (2007). Bootstrapping processes in the development of students' commonsense matter theories: Using analogical mappings, thought experiments, and learning to measure to promote conceptual restructuring. Cognition and Instruction, 25(4), 337-398.Smith, C., Maclin, D., Grosslight, L., & Davis, H. (1997). Teaching for understanding: A study of students' preinstruction theories of matter and comparison of the effectiveness of two approaches to teaching about matter and density. Cognition and Instruction, 15(3), 317-393.Smith, C., Snir, J., & & Grosslight, L. (1992). Using conceptual models to facilitate conceptual change: The case of weight-density differentiation. Cognition and Instruction, 9(3), 221-283.Wiser, M. (1995). Use of history of science to understand and remedy students' misconceptions about heat and temperature. In D. N. Perkins, J. L. Schwartz, M. M. West & M. S. Wiske (Eds.), Software goes to school (pp. 23-38). New York: Oxford University Press. The concepts of the adult or child or learner are seen as themselves embedded within intuitive theories that require substantial restructuring if they are to resemble those of the scientist. This perspective was the most directly inspired by Kuhn's work. Indeed, some specific adult beliefs and children's pre-instruction concepts were seen as resembling some early concepts in the history of science.
A closely related perspective to this theory change view makes a particular claim about the differences between naïve and scientific concepts. This "ontological shift" viewChi, M. T. H. (2005). Common sense conceptions of emergent processes: Why some misconceptions are robust. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14, 161-199.Chi, M. T. H. (1992). Conceptual change within and across ontological categories: Examples from learning and discovery in science. In R. N. Giere (Ed.), Cognitive models of science: Vol. 15. Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (pp. 129-186) Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Chi, M. T. H., & Slotta, J. D. (1993). The ontological coherence of intuitive physics. Cognition and Instruction, 10(2 & 3), 249-260.Slotta, J. D., Chi, M. T., & & Joram, E. (1995). Assessing students' misclassifications of physics concepts: An ontological basis for conceptual change. Cognition and Instruction, 13(3), 373-400. emphasizes that many naïve concepts are incorrectly assigned to the broad (ontological) category of material substance rather than to the ontological category of (constraint-based) processes. Conceptual change, on this view, involves constructing the new ontological category of constraint-based processes and reassigning the concept to this correct category.
A third view, draws from some of the basic commitments of these first two views but provides a more dynamic account of the formation of naïve conceptions. This "framework theory" viewVosniadou, S. (2002). On the nature of naïve physics. In M. Limon & L. Mason (Eds.), Reconsidering conceptual change: Issues in theory and practice, (pp. 61-76) Dordrecht: Kluwer.Vosniadou, S., & Brewer, W. F. (1992). Mental models of the earth: A study of conceptual change in childhood. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 535-585.Vosniadou, S., Vamvakoussi, X. & Skopeliti, I. (2008). The framework theory approach to the problem of conceptual change. In S. Vosniadou (Ed.), International handbook of research on conceptual change. New York, NY: Routledge.Ioannides, C. & Vosniadou, C. (2002). The changing meanings of force. Cognitive Science Quarterly, 2, 5-61. suggests that when new ideas are encountered, basic ontological commitments influence how they are ignored, resisted, or assimilated. The result is often a model consistent with both the ontological commitments and aspects of the new ideas presented. However, there is often a distortion of the new idea in the process. Successful conceptual change on this view requires strategic changes in the interfering ontological commitments.