Examines children's understanding of burning focusing on questions such as: "What are children's views of burning prior to and after instruction?," and "Do children's views become more scientific?" A significant difference was found in children's understanding before and after instruction. (Author/MM)

Three experiments examined 3- to 11-year-olds' understanding of entropy, asking whether undifferentiated forces, such as the wind or objects being thrown into the air, could create order or disorder in a set of objects. Found that even 4-year-olds were sensitive to asymmetrical effects of such events. Older children applied this principle more…

Discusses issues related to orality, aurality, and literacy in the teaching and understanding of mathematics. Also discusses ritual and tradition in mathematics instruction. (MM)

Discusses thinking about thinking and the generation of ideas. Makes the case that people are naturally creative and that consciously applying some key elements of creative thinking to their jobs every day can elevate their interpretive tools to a new level. (MM)

A gerontology doctoral program used the concepts of homeostasis and complexity to present biomedical and psychosocial issues. Data from 14 students showed that homeostasis was more useful for biomedical than psychosocial issues. Complexity helped in understanding interactions between the two. (SK)

"Conception" is the unit of description in Phenomenography. It has two intertwined aspects: the referential aspect, which denotes the global meaning of the object conceptualized; and the structural aspect, which shows the specific combination of features that have been discerned and focused on. We define a feature of an object as a way…

The pervasiveness of metaphor in environmental discourse suggests important questions about the role of metaphor in environmental learning. A conception of environmental thinking and action is proposed, which identifies five analytically distinct "moments" of "environmental sensemaking": conceptualising, knowing about, knowing how to respond,…

In this article, I develop the idea that the starting point of moral education is formed by the affective commitments individuals make in the course of growing up. The task of education is to enable children to critically consider and revise these commitments, as part of the development of a reflective personal identity. Ethical concepts like…

This paper offers an account of, and findings from, an approach to designing and evaluating an instructional sequence set in the context of Newton's third law. The design of the sequence draws upon conceptual change theory and the concept of the "bridging analog" is extended to introduce the notion of a "bridging representation" Attention is also…

Students' attitudes toward and conceptual understanding of chemical instrumentation is surveyed. The study shows that, in general, the students' attitudes toward using instrumentation in the lab is quite positive and they felt that using instrumentation in the lab allowed them not only to connect "chemistry" and the "real world", but also to…

Concept properties are an integral part of theories of conceptual representation and processing. To date, little is known about conceptual properties of abstract concepts, such as idea. This experiment systematically compared the content of 18 abstract and 18 concrete concepts, using a feature generation task. Thirty-one participants listed…

Children form their own ideas, which become their beliefs based on their experiences. The misconceptions prevailing within children are stated with the measures to guide them to examine their ideas.

This study explores college students' representations about the nature of theories during their enrollment in a large astronomy course with instruction designed to address a number of nature of science issues. We focus our investigation on how nine students represent their understanding of theory, how they distinguish between scientific theories…

Memory-based and constructionist processes have both been proposed as essential components of the activation of concepts (e.g., propositions) and the establishment of meaningful connections between concepts during reading. In this article, we argue that a comprehensive theory of reading comprehension should include both sets of processes. In…

In this theoretical article, we distinguish two stages of learning a new mathematical concept--participatory and anticipatory. We use a recently developed mechanism for explaining mathematical conceptual learning--reflection on activity-effect relationship--as well as von Glasersfeld's tripartite model of a scheme, to explain qualitative…