Assessing the application of three theories of conceptual change to interdisciplinary data sets

Devlin Montfort, Geoffrey L. Herman, R. Streveler, Shane A. Brown
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引用次数: 10

Abstract

The study of students' preconceptions and how they affect their learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields is of nationally recognized importance. There are, however, various and contradictory theoretical approaches to conceptual change, and none of them have been rigorously applied in the context of engineering education. This paper is part of a larger study drawing on existing sets of data from a wide range of engineering content areas to develop a theoretical explanation of conceptual change in engineering education. In the work reported here we re-analyze students' understanding of concepts about axially loaded members (from mechanics of materials) and Boolean logic (from digital logic). Previously published analyses of these data argue that the context of a problem or question effects students' reasoning about that concept. These contexts can range from the presence or absence of figures or diagrams to the social contexts of the problem. We explored three potential theoretical explanations for the context-sensitivity of student reasoning: (1) a perceptual cues theory, (2) a domain specificity theory, and (3) a language-based theory. It is argued that these competing theoretical explanations do not contradict each other as much as they overlap, and potentially productive syntheses of the theories are proposed as directions for future work.
评估三种概念变化理论在跨学科数据集中的应用
研究学生的先入之见及其如何影响他们在科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)领域的学习,具有全国公认的重要性。然而,有各种各样的和相互矛盾的理论方法来解释概念的变化,没有一个被严格地应用于工程教育的背景下。本文是一项大型研究的一部分,该研究利用了来自广泛工程内容领域的现有数据集,以对工程教育中的概念变化进行理论解释。在这里报告的工作中,我们重新分析了学生对轴向载荷成员(来自材料力学)和布尔逻辑(来自数字逻辑)概念的理解。先前发表的对这些数据的分析认为,问题或问题的背景会影响学生对该概念的推理。这些背景可以从存在或不存在的数字或图表到问题的社会背景。我们探讨了学生推理情境敏感性的三种可能的理论解释:(1)感知线索理论,(2)领域特异性理论,(3)基于语言的理论。有人认为,这些相互竞争的理论解释并不像它们重叠那样相互矛盾,并且这些理论的潜在生产综合被提出作为未来工作的方向。
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