Everyday Concepts Research Articles

Integrating Scientific and Everyday Concepts: Student Leadership in a Language Learning Community

This study examines the role of everyday and scientific concepts in developing student leadership in a self-access learning center (SALC) in Japan. For this purpose, data from three student learning community leaders and one SALC faculty member participating in an 18-month ethnographic case study of the Learning Group (LG), a student-led learning community within a university-based SALC in central Japan, was reexamined according to a framework informed by concept-based learning. Data was first coded inductively utilizing reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and subsequently deductively using communities of practice theory and the themes of scientific and everyday knowledge. This data highlights numerous ways three leaders of the LG had internalized concepts introduced to them through a SALC-based leadership course administered by a learning advisor (LA) and how this influenced not only their individual learning trajectories, but also the path of their community. Furthermore, the LG leaders were able to develop coherent management/facilitation guidelines for themselves and for future generations of leaders from the social mediation that collaborative group reflection and intentional reflective dialogue afforded. The implications of this study highlight the potential value within SALCs of learning advisors engaging in concept-based instructional approaches where explicit instruction is internalized through dialogic and communicative verbalization and through finding avenues for learners to apply scientific concepts to everyday practice.

Theorizing “Primal World Beliefs”: A Relational-Developmental Account

Clifton and his colleagues have proposed a dimension-based conception of “primal world beliefs” – beliefs about “the overall character of the world.” Citing the potential importance of “primal world beliefs,” Lansford et al. (this volume) have called for research on their development. In this paper, I suggest that the concepts of “primal,” “world,” and “belief” rely on unarticulated everyday concepts that are psychologically undertheorized. The model of “primal world belief” is a kind of methodological artifact; that is, it arises as a dual product of everyday trait-like thinking and factor analytic methodology. Thus, while the authors are hopeful that “primal world beliefs” may provide an alternative way to explain the sources of stability that are typically attributed to “personality traits,” Clifton and his colleagues have themselves produced a kind of “trait theory of beliefs” – one that is vulnerable to many of the same critiques directed toward trait models of personality. After a critical analysis of the theoretical framework that undergirds the concept of “primal world beliefs,” I offer a relational-developmental approach to the empirical study of how children develop beliefs within and about our intersubjectively structured lifeworlds.

Māori loanwords in New Zealand English

Abstract The Indigenous language of ANZ, Māori is undergoing significant revitalisation, following severe loss of vitality caused by English colonialism. One dimension to this revitalisation is the normalising of borrowings from Māori into New Zealand English (NZE). However, there are currently no empirical studies of adults’ naming patterns for concepts that can be lexicalised by Māori words in NZE. We report on a picture-naming experiment in which 48 participants are asked to name a set of target and control pictures depicting everyday concepts from three semantic categories which involve Māori borrowings: flora/fauna, people/places, material culture. Following a background questionnaire, we group participants into three categories, depending on their orientation towards Māori language and culture. Results suggest a clear association between participant orientation and their use of Māori loanwords. Alternative interpretations are discussed, including questions for future research on the relationship between NZE lexical variation and language planning.

SEEING IS NOT UNDERSTANDING: Vygotsky, Halliday and Metaphor in Forming and Forgetting Middle School Science Concepts.

When teachers explain science concepts-for example, the solar wind, or plasma waves-some methods seem to be quick-acting and others long-lasting. Still others pose as many problems as they seem to solve. How, for example, does a parent explain how there can be solar wind without any air in space? How does a teacher explain how there can be plasma waves without any water? Locating metaphor between thinking and speech rather than within one or the other, we work out a single scheme to analyze two conversations with adult Koreans. These suggest that a text studied some ten years ago in middle school science class, replete with striking visual images, has left little more than everyday concepts. Instead of trying to use the striking visual images to refill gaps in the memory, however, the questions asked by a skilled science teacher suggest ways in which thinking could be freed from the middle school dogma of only three matter phases (solid, liquid, gas). To understand a metaphor like "solar wind", we need to replace fixed matters of fact with some more elusive facts of matter.

The Teachability of Global Citizenship to Children through Empirical Environmental Education: Reflections from a Horticultural Project in a Spanish School

In a context defined by the internationalisation of educational policies and the supranational nature of school programmes, we highlight the desirability of promoting local strategies for teaching environmental sustainability in order to contribute to the formation of global citizenship in children. Based on the experience of a horticultural curricular project in a school in northern Spain, the aim of this article is to reflect on the need for socio-educational communities to transform the objectives of environmental education into tools with which children can co-responsibly build connections to modify or enrich their everyday concepts of caring for the planet. To do this, semiotic analysis of different official school documents is used as a key methodology. Our findings invite consideration of the fact that pedagogies designed to train children in global citizenship competencies should not be limited to the classroom or to reproducing the proposals of institutional documents. Rather, they should be based on the prior knowledge and experiences of all members of the community, above all, of the children. From this perspective, the promotion of empirical learning situations is essential for the acquisition of meaningful and appropriate environmental contents, in the sense that they allow children, as future global citizens, to recognise the ethical repercussions of their own actions and decisions.

Examining the Construction of “Teaching Assessment Literacy”: A Case Study of Teacher Conceptual Development in Collaborative Research Practice

Abstract This study explored the trajectory of teacher concept development during collaborative research practice promoted by a university-school partnership teacher development program. Drawing on Vygotsky’s and Engeström’s notion of concept formation, it examined how a secondary EFL teaching-research officer (TRO) negotiated between scientific and everyday concepts as she co-constructed the research theme “teaching assessment literacy” with mentors and fellow teachers mediated by the program. Multiple sources of data were collected over a span of two years, including six rounds of oral defense and research reporting activities, classroom observations, interviews, journals, and research reports. The analysis showed that the TRO experienced a gradually integrated and transformed path of concept development, and also initiated an expansive learning opportunity for her research participants, triggering collective concept development. While the program played a significant role in providing multi-module facilitating activities, academic-practice joint mentoring and collective scaffolding, more subtle guidance is suggested for the tension-laden process.

Scientific language use and sensemaking in concept maps: Interaction between concept systems, scientific concepts and everyday concepts

The interaction between student language use and sensemaking is an area in science learning that needs further elucidation in order to meet government standards in science education. In this study, concept mapping was used to explore the relationship between scientific language use and sensemaking defined as the interaction between the scientific concept system and everyday concepts in order to make sense of a proposed phenomenon. Eighty-eight concept maps from five different school classes and two school systems were analyzed in terms of their language use and concept formation from a Vygotskian perspective. This work proposes an intimate relationship between student language use, concept system formation and sensemaking in science, indicating possible implications for the study of learning as well as formative assessment using concept maps.

VYGOTSKY’S PERSPECTIVE ON CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD AND THE ROLE OF INSTRUCTION IN IT

This theoretical paper maps down the process of concept development from Vygotsky’s theory of concept formation, the steps involved in the concept formation and the role of instruction in it. Vygotsky distinguished between lower order thinking and higher order thinking and he classified concepts into everyday concepts and scientific concepts. Scientific concepts are higher order cognitive processes as it is learnt by a child in a mediated process, in contrast to everyday concepts which are learnt through everyday experiences. Moreover, he gave the concept of the zone of proximal development and its role in the development of scientific concepts. This paper provides a detailed description of the process of concept development and the role of instruction in it. KEYWORDS: Concepts, everyday concepts, scientific concepts, zone of proximal development

The Story Behind the Link between Molecular Chirality and Crystal Shape

AbstractHere we describe the story behind the link between molecular chirality and macroscopic phenomena, the latter being a probe for the direct assignment of absolute configuration of chiral molecules. First, a brief tour of the history of molecular stereochemistry, starting with the classic experiment reported byPasteurin 1848 on the separation of enantiomorphous crystals of a salt of tartaric acid, and his conclusion that the molecules of life are chiral of single‐handedness. With time, this study raised, inter alia, two fundamental questions: the absolute configuration of chiral molecules and how a molecule of given configuration shapes the enantiomorphous morphology of its crystal. As for the first question, following the beginning of crystal structure determination by X‐ray diffraction in 1912, it took almost 40 years beforeBijvoetassigned molecular chirality through the esoteric method involving anomalous X‐ray scattering. We have been able to address and link both questions through ‘everyday concepts of left and right’ (in the words ofJack Dunitz) by the use of ‘tailor‐made’ auxiliaries. By such means, it proved possible to reveal, through morphology, etch patterns, epitaxy and symmetry reduction of both chiral and, paradoxically, centrosymmetric crystals, the basic chiral symmetry of the molecules of life, the α‐amino acids and sugars.

Avoid an Allele Audit

Students are often intimidated by genetic evolution equations because they do not relate to everyday concepts. We developed and piloted an instructional scaffolding patterned after income tax return forms that students use to calculate Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, natural selection, and mutation-selection balance of alleles. Students sequentially solve these evolution equations by entering variables into a series of cascading calculations similar to an Internal Revenue Service Tax Form 1040. We discuss suggestions for implementation of this exercise and demonstrate through assessment data that students have improved understanding of these equations after its application.

SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT OF RESPIRATION ON THE BASE OF "NEW BIOLOGY" COURSE (ELKONIN-DAVYDOV SYSTEM)

A lot of researches has shown the low rate of students? understanding of key biological scientific concepts. The analysis of the school difficulties reasons in the scientific concept assimilation demonstrates that everyday ideas about biological processes often contradict scientific concepts and students do not overcome these contradictions on their own. The traditional way of teaching based on the verbal content presentation and accompanied by visual demonstration of examples does not help students in transforming their everyday concepts. The way of students? independent cognitive movement is more effective, being based on educational modeling. Teachers help students to notice contradictions in their opinions, to ask questions and to plan their own research that answers the posed questions. The article describes in detail this way of teaching through the example of the respiration concept development. The turning points in the process of everyday concepts transformation into scientific ones are shown.

Al-Farabi on acquiring a philosophical concept

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on a discussion in Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s Book of Letters (Kitāb al-Ḥurūf), which has to do with the importation of philosophical (including scientific) discourse from one language or nation (ummah) to another. The question of importing philosophical discourse from one language or nation to another touches on Farabi’s views on a number of important philosophical questions. It reveals something about his views on the nature of philosophical and scientific concepts and their relation to concepts in non-philosophical or ‘popular’ discourse, as well as the means of grasping previously unencountered concepts. In this article, I will discuss these issues both to ascertain Farabi’s views as well as to shed some light on them in their own right. I will argue that Farabi thinks that the understanding of some novel philosophical or scientific concepts sometimes depends on the grasp of related concepts from ordinary discourse, and that experts rely on these everyday concepts in acquiring the more specialized concepts. If the same linguistic terms are used to denote both concepts, they will be ambiguous, but this can be considered a case of ‘productive ambiguity,’ since it aids in the acquisition of novel concepts.

Back to Basics: The Importance of Conceptual Clarification in Psychological Science

Although the lack of conceptual clarity has been observed to be a widespread and fundamental problem in psychology, conceptual clarification plays a mostly marginal role in psychological research. In this article, we argue that better conceptualization of psychological phenomena is needed to move psychology forward as a science. We first show how conceptual unclarity seeps through all aspects of psychological research, from everyday concepts to statistical measures. We then turn to recommendations on how to improve conceptual clarity in psychology, emphasizing the importance of seeing research as an iterative process in which it is necessary to revisit the phenomena that are the foundations of theories and models, as well as how they are conceptualized and measured.

A Cultural-historical Pedagogical Model as a Potential Developmental Tool in Schools

South Africa consistently lags behind other nations on international benchmarking tests of literacy, mathematics and, especially, science as illustrated in the low achievement outcomes on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests. Research in the 21st century has shown that learning science at an early age is a predictor of scientific literacy later in life. The low science achievement in South Africa is impacted by several variables, however, one important aspect of students’ failure to acquire science reasoning skills lies in how they are taught science. Drawing on the work of Vygotsky, Hedegaard, Freire, and Feuerstein, this paper reports on an intervention using a novel pedagogical model to teach science in grade two classrooms. A comparative case study is presented where one teacher is trained in the novel pedagogical model and one is not trained to use this model. Both teachers teach in the same school and the demographics of the children in the two separate classes studied are similar. Findings indicate that where the novel pedagogical model is used, the teacher uses more scientific, abstract concepts in her lesson; she links the abstract to the children’s everyday concepts and, perhaps most significantly, she illustrates to students why they must learn the content she is teaching them.

Secondary Education Students’ Knowledge Gain and Scaffolding Needs in Mobile Outdoor Learning Settings

Science education enhances students’ scientific literacy in order to interact with the world responsibly and contribute to democratic and informed decision-making. The emergence of place-responsive pedagogy and mobile technology with a variety of affordances has refocused attention on students’ direct embodied experience. P-responsive pedagogy combined with mobile technologies provides numerous opportunities for investigating, across contexts, everyday socio-economical environmental problems inherent to a particular location. Forming an evidence-based decision on socio-economical environmental real-life problems requires a more in depth understanding of natural processes than just making use of everyday knowledge that is based on perceptions and direct observations. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the secondary education students’ (a) awareness and understanding about a timely socio-environmental challenge, (b) development of the scientific vocabulary, (c) scaffolding needs during the mobile outdoor collaborative inquiry-based learning event. To fulfill the aims, action research with an experimental technology-enhanced collaborative inquiry learning design was created to investigate students’ knowledge gain and scaffolding needs. Three interventions with a total of 68 secondary education students (age 14–15) were conducted. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The results demonstrate the change in students’ opinions about the complex socio-economical environmental challenge and transformation from everyday concepts to more scientific knowledge, and their need for conceptual and procedural scaffolding. This paper adds new insights on how to utilize non-gamified use of mobile technology to empower secondary students’ scientific literacy and understanding in authentic settings.

Lexical Interference of Russian and Karelian in the Diachronic Aspect of Language Policy

Introduction. At the moment the territory of the Russian Federation comprises 138 endangered languages, which determines the relevance of studying the influence of the state’s language policy on the development of the Karelian language. The purpose of the study is to analyze the way language contacts influenced Karelian. The novelty of the study lies in the consideration of linguistic interference in the historical context.Methodology and sources. The study is conducted using the publications in Karelian of the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods, as well as articles from modern electronic periodicals. The research material was broadened by interviewing several informants. The data was collected and analyzed using the method of continuous sampling, questioning, participant observation, and comparative analysis. The theoretical basis of the research is the social typology of languages and the typology of language situations.Results and discussion. Different historical periods ended in changing Karelian in different ways and making it adopt some features of Finnish, Vepsian and Russian. The texts of the pre-Soviet period show that lexical units of Russian origin denote everyday realities or religious concepts. The Soviet period texts demonstrate the maximum number of Russianbased lexical units, that are related to everyday life or Soviet ideology and realities. In the texts of the modern period, there is the least number of words of Russian origin, that are mostly borrowings that have long been a part of the language norm of Karelian.Conclusion. With the distinctive features relevant to the typology of language situations taken into account, the present language situation in the Republic of Karelia can be defined as multicomponent multilingual, being demographically out of equilibrium and communicatively unbalanced. In different historical periods Karelian was influenced, in varying degrees, by Russian; this is clearly reflected in the vocabulary. Nowadays professional and amateur activists striving to revitalize the Karelian language are oriented mainly towards its Baltic-Finnish basis.

Linguistic metaconcepts can improve grammatical understanding in L1 education evidence from a Dutch quasi-experimental study.

This mixed-method quasi-experimental study examined whether metaconceptual grammar teaching impacts on (a) students' L1 grammatical understanding, (b) their 'blind' use of grammatical concepts and (c) their preference of using explicit grammatical concepts over everyday concepts in explaining grammatical problems. Previous research, involving single group pre-postintervention designs, found positive effects for metaconceptual interventions on secondary school students' grammatical reasoning ability, although a negative side effect seemed to be that some students started using grammatical concepts 'blindly' (i.e., in an inaccurate way). While there are thus important clues that metaconceptual grammar teaching may lead to increased grammatical understanding, there is a great need for more robust empirical research. The current study, involving 196 Dutch 14-year old pre-university students, is a methodological improvement of previous work, adopting a switching replications design. Bayesian multivariate analyses indicate medium to large effects from the metaconceptual intervention on students' grammatical understanding. The study found a similar effect of the intervention on students' ability to use explicit grammatical concepts over everyday concepts in tackling grammatical problems. No evidence for increased 'blind' concept use as a negative byproduct of the intervention was found. Additional qualitative analyses of in-intervention tasks provided further evidence for the effectiveness of metaconceptual interventions, and seemed to indicate that cases of blind concept use, rather than being a negative side effect, might actually be part of a gradual process of students' growing understanding of grammatical (meta)concepts. We discuss these findings in relation to previous work and conclude that linguistic metaconcepts can improve L1 grammatical understanding.

Sense and nonsense in psychological measurement: A case of problem and method passing one another by

There exists conceptual confusion in the psychological measurement literature. One such example is the nonsense of the question, “are psychological attributes quantitative?” when referring to nontechnical psychological phenomena. Rather than debating whether this is an empirical or conceptual question, the issue of concern should be whether it makes sense to ask it. As illuminated by Wittgenstein almost a century ago, the concepts of psychology are everyday concepts rather than technical ones. However, the enduring comparison of psychology with the physical sciences leads to the adoption of technical language that loses its meaning when used with the aim of explaining everyday concepts. For this reason, asking whether psychological attributes are quantitative is, in many cases, a nonsensical question to ask.

Between school and ethical–political everyday action: a comprehensive framework of the development of historical thinking

ABSTRACT Historical thinking is a construct approached by different disciplines with a recent proliferation in research interest compared to thinking in other domains. Leading exponents do not agree on its definition and include the two main traditions: Anglo-American and German, and various groups or research centres throughout the Western world. Something problematic happens with the models of progression or development of historical thinking that lack an agreed upon psychological theory as their foundation. We argue that theoretical differences are produced by the split between the psychological, considered individually, and the social, considered external to individual thought. In this article we propose that researchers of the development of historical thinking can benefit from a re-reading of Vygotskian theory, with a focus on everyday concepts, scientific concepts and zones of proximal development. In this paper, we carry out a conceptual systemization of historical thinking based on this literature. We distinguish several dimensions that we group into three ‘macro-dimensions’ according to their psychological dynamics of development, which is dialectically related with history education and the socio-historical conditions surrounding it. These macro-dimensions explain the developmental rhythms of historical thinking and include the disciplinary knowledge macro-dimension, the epistemological macro-dimension, and the ethical–political macro-dimension.

«Трудное дыхание»: к вопросу о преодолении натурального в культурном

The problem of transforming everyday concepts of a child into scientific concepts and their interaction posed by L.S. Vygotskii is still relevant. This article analyzes the transformation of the everyday concept of breathing and respiration to the scientific concept, starting with the ideas of a preschooler and up to the end of school age. The material of the experimental teaching within the framework of a five-year biology course for middle school is presented in comparison with the traditional introduction of the scientific concept. Teaching-learning processes are investigated as a series of mediation acts. Analysis of the students learning activity and their learning difficulties demonstrates the dynamics of conceptual changes. It is possible to see the relationship between the initial (‘everyday’) and the emerging scientific concept. Observations are analyzed from the point of view of Lev Vygotskii and his scientific school and other investigators also. The conditions for overcoming the ‘encapsulation’ of scientific concepts in human consciousness are discussed. The way of development and final appropriation of a scientific concept is shown. The nature of the transformation of an everyday concept in interaction with the scientific concept are discussed.