Introduction: Conceptual Change and Its Models

Abstract

This special issue of Science and Education contains selected articles from the Conceptual Change and Its Models (ConChaMo) workshops held in 2012–2013 in Helsinki, Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, made possible with the generous support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. The workshops brought together researchers from diverse fields of science, cognitive science and educational sciences, in order to develop views and insight how conceptual learning and conceptual change takes place and could be facilitated in science learning. Conceptual change is a central notion of many contemporary accounts of learning. It refers to learning process, where learners do not merely accumulate more knowledge, but where their conceptions of phenomena in a certain domain undergo a restructuring process, leading from common-sense beliefs to scientific conceptions. The conceptual change approach on learning has potential to transform science education, and bring it closer to the empirical and theoretical work on conceptual development, concept learning, and conceptual evolution in psychology, philosophy and cognitive science. The general goal of the thematic special issue is to facilitate interdisciplinary communication so that progress will be made towards integrated theories of conceptual change. The aim is not only to bring researchers and ideas together, but also to unite them in the form of new types of research methods and theoretical models. Combining the approaches of the psychological, educational, philosophical, and computational sciences will result in deeper understanding of conceptual change. Conceptual change, as a research paradigm itself, and how the different views on cognitive and psychological mechanisms have framed the conceptions of conceptual change, is discussed in the article Towards an Explanation for Conceptual Change: A Mechanistic Alternative by Anna-Mari Rusanen. She introduces some new viewpoint on understanding the conceptual change as a research paradigm, and argues that proper understanding of conceptual change hinges on proper description for the information processing task and on cognitive mechanisms responsible for those tasks.