Abstract
Conceptual knowledge is a crucial tool for students to understand scientific phenomena. Knowledge about the structure and function of mental concepts potentially helps science educators to foster the acquisition of this tool. Specifically, the coherence of students’ mental concepts is an intensely discussed issue within the related conceptual change discourse. While former discussions focused on the question of whether these conceptions are coherent or not, recent approaches describe them as dynamic systems behaving more or less coherently in different situations. In this contribution, we captured this dynamic behavior of individual concepts by means of network analysis. Transcribed video data of 16 pairs of students working on four subsequent experiments on energy were transformed into weighted networks, which in turn were characterized by standardized coherence parameters. These coherence parameters and more basic network parameters were correlated with students’ pre-post scores of a multiple-choice test on the energy concept. We found that the coherence parameter is significantly related to the students’ test scores. Even more intense relations are indicated if networks are calculated solely based on conceptual key terms. Implications as well as methodological constraints of this approach are discussed.
Highlights
Scientific concepts constitute powerful tools to make sense of the world, within the scientific community as well as in everyday life [1]
We found that the coherence parameter is significantly related to the students’ test scores
The aim of the present study was to characterize the verbal contributions students make while working on a series of experiments related to the energy concept by means of different network parameters
Summary
Scientific concepts constitute powerful tools to make sense of the world, within the scientific community as well as in everyday life [1]. Research has put much effort on questions concerning the nature of individual concepts and their development, e.g., from naïve interpretations of the world to normatively accepted thinking tools [5]. Some proponents argue that individual conceptions consist of several elements like presuppositions, beliefs, and mental models which coherently interact in a system and, are best described as theory like themselves [8,9]. Others advocate for describing individual conceptions as more loosely connected clusters of intuitive fragments which are supposed to be of smaller grain size compared to theories [10,11,12]. Besides the fact that proponents of both views agree that individual conceptions might consists of smaller elements, they are still in opposition as they apply contrary notions of what Brown
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