Conceptual Resources in Self‐developed Explanatory Models: The importance of integrating conscious and intuitive knowledge

Abstract

This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the obstacles preventing them from constructing a useful explanatory model. Our findings indicate that several of the children were able to construct explanatory models. However, of the six children interviewed multiple times (three third-graders and three sixth-graders), only one was consistently able to critique and revise her models to arrive at a consistent, coherent, and sophisticated explanatory model. Connecting intuitive knowledge and abstract knowledge was important in her construction of a coherent and sophisticated explanatory model. Students who relied only on intuitive knowledge constructed tentative and nonsophisticated explanatory models. Students who relied only on verbal-symbolic knowledge at an abstract level without connection with their intuition also did not construct coherent and sophisticated models. These results indicate that instruction should help students to become metaconceptually aware and connect their verbal-symbolic knowledge and intuition in order to construct explanatory models to make sense of abstract scientific knowledge.

Varying Use of Conceptual Metaphors across Levels of Expertise in Thermodynamics

“…The present study also adds to previous work on the coordination of propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures (Cheng & Brown, 2010;Georgiou, 2014;Singh, 2002) by pointing out the role of a knowledge type that has not been studied much to date -i.e. conceptual metaphors -and by being more explicit about the nature and role of a variety of knowledge elements involved in expert scientific problem solving.…”

“…More recently, it has been increasingly acknowledged that scientific expertise involves the coordination of abstract knowledge, formulated propositionally, and nonpropositional knowledge structures and processes (e.g. Amin, 2009;Amin, Smith, & Wiser, 2014;Cheng & Brown, 2010;Jeppsson, Haglund, Amin, & Strömdahl, 2013;Sherin, 2001Sherin, , 2006. The study reported in this paper contributes to this recent effort aimed at understanding the difference between novices and experts in terms of both propositionally represented knowledge and non-formal knowledge structures and processes.…”

“…A number of researchers have begun to investigate scientific expertise as the coordinated use of propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures and processes (Amin, 2009;Amin, Jeppsson, Haglund, & Strömdahl, 2012;Cheng & Brown, 2010;diSessa & Sherin, 1998;Georgiou, 2014;Jeppsson et al, 2013;Sherin, 2001;Singh, 2002). diSessa & Sherin (1998) extended diSessa's earlier work on p-prims as a constituent of expert scientific understanding and reasoning, by proposing the construct of a coordination class.…”

“…This coordination has also been studied in the early stages of the acquisition of scientific expertise. For example, in their investigation of thirdand sixth-grade students' explanations of magnetic phenomena, Cheng and Brown (2010) found that the most advanced and robust reasoning relied on a combination of intuitive knowledge and more formal (what they called "verbal-symbolic") knowledge. Similarly, Georgiou (2014) analysed undergraduate students' work on context-rich thermodynamics problems, from the perspective of 'semantic gravity', the degree to which the meaning of language in a particular instance is dependent on its context.…”

Instructional Support for Intuitive Knowledge Acquisition When Learning with an Ecological Computer Simulation

“…Research literature shows a wide range of terms associated with intuitive knowledge, such as intuition [10,[23][24][25][26][27][28], tacit knowledge [29,30], implicit knowledge [31], and intuitive understanding [22]. Among the various definitions of intuition, e.g., references [20,32], we refer to the definition by Swaak and de Jong [8] and implement the concept of intuitive knowledge synonymously with the term intuition.…”