Conceptual Change in Cognitive Science Education - towards Understanding and Supporting Multidisciplinary Learning

Entering into higher education, students' conceptions undergo a restructuring process. When this reorganization is comprehensive, it is called "conceptual change". In this paper, a framework for discipline-based research into student conceptions and learning in cognitive science education is presented, in which conceptual differentiation is taken to be the key to conceptual change in learning cognitive science. Commonsense concepts are seen as loosely organized clusters of features without unified, coherent logical structure, but already containing, in embryonic form, the basic thought patterns out of which the scientific conceptions are constructed. This construction process requires that the student first differentiates or abstracts the right conceptual elements (both in terms of contexts of application , terminology associated with them, and the inferential patterns they enter into), and then organizes them into definite schemata in which conceptual relations are based on theoretical definitions, rather than situational cues or associations. The special requirements of a multidisciplinary science and empirical, and educational implications of the focus on differentiation are discussed.