This article explores the legacy of Paul Pintrich in regard to theory and research in conceptual change. Specifically, this article reviews his vision for a view of conceptual change--a vision that integrated motivation and affect within a broader view of cognition in the classroom (Pintrich, 1999; Pintrich & Sinatra, 2003). This article describes…

This paper reports a study that attempts to explore how using mobile technologies in direct physical interaction with space and with other players can be combined with principles of engagement and self-motivation to create a powerful and engaging learning experience. We developed a mobile gaming experience designed to encourage the development of…

The author remembers how exciting it was when the teacher had "stuff" on the front desk: unfamiliar objects and other things out of place in the traditional classroom. Years later, as a new teacher, the author learned the importance of building lessons around concepts and that demonstrations are an integral part of concept development in science.…

In this study, a close-ended questionnaire examining all aspects of photosynthesis simultaneously has been developed and administered to 290 Greek pupils aged 13. It contains complementary or logically related items that permitted us to assess the understanding of each aspect by carrying out crossanalysis. The main findings are: that pupils are…

This study investigated the relationship of student-generated questions and prior knowledge with reading comprehension. A questioning hierarchy was developed to describe the extent to which student-generated questions seek different levels of conceptual understanding. Third- and fourth-grade students (N = 360) posed questions that were related to…

A kindergarten teacher describes how children conceptualized the genre of Mystery. An exploration of mystery reveals the processes young children use to construct their understandings of genre.

More and more persons with mental retardation and psychiatric disabilities are present in mainstream society, yet have little interaction and few relationships outside their own peer groups of devalued persons. Social integration remains a desirable yet elusive goal for most human service organizations, and there continues to be a certain amount…

The field of instructional design has traditionally treated concepts as discrete learning outcomes. Theoretically, learning concepts requires correctly isolating and applying attributes of specific objects into their correct categories. Similarity views of concept learning are unable to account for all of the rules governing concept formation,…

Young children experience considerable difficulty in learning their first few color terms. One explanation for this difficulty is that initially they lack a conceptual representation of color sufficiently abstract to support word meaning. This hypothesis, that prior to learning color terms children do not represent color as an abstraction, was…

This research analyzes students' conceptual change across a semester in an 8th-grade thermodynamics curriculum. Fifty students were interviewed 5 times during their 8th-grade semester and then again preceding their 10th- and 12th-grade years to follow their subsequent progress. The interview questions probed students' understanding of…

Different visualization techniques have been used for teaching chemistry concepts. Previous studies have shown that when molecular animations and video demonstrations are used, students seem to better correlate all three levels of representation: macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic. This thinking process allows the students to improve their…

A description of learning experience that uses a four-step instrumentational framework involving concrete and representational experiences to promote conceptual understanding of abstract biological concepts by a series of closely-related activities is presented. The students are introduced to the structure and implications of DNA using four…

Patients with category-specific deficits have motivated a range of hypotheses about the structure of the conceptual system. One class of models claims that apparent category dissociations emerge from the internal structure of concepts rather than fractionation of the system into separate substores. This account claims that distinctive properties…

C. L. Gagn? and E. J. Shoben (1997) proposed that concepts are combined via external relations and that lexical entries include information about which relations are frequent for every modifying noun. As evidence for this view, they showed that relations associated with the modifier affected the interpretation of combinations in several studies in…

Learning trajectories are presented of 2 fifth-grade children, Jason and Laura, who participated in the teaching experiment, Children's Construction of the Rational Numbers of Arithmetic. 5 teaching episodes were held with the 2 children, October 15 and November 1, 8, 15, and 22. During the fourth grade, the 2 children demonstrated distinctly…