Science Education . Learning to Use Scientific Concepts

In their abstract, Treagust and Duit ask “whether conceptual change can provide a powerful framework for improving instructional practice in such a way that students’ levels of scientific literacy are significantly increased.” And later in their paper they quote PISA 2000’s definition of scientific literacy as “the capacity to identify questions and to draw evidence-based conclusions in order to understand and help to make decisions about the natural world and the changes made to it through human activity” [78]. Since both quotations are concerned with the achievement of scientific literacy, although addressed from very different perspectives, together they provide a framework within which to consider how far the research on conceptual change has contributed to the achievement of PISA’s goals for scientific literacy. My question is: Is the attempt to change students’ concepts the best way to proceed? As did Treagust and Duit, I want to start by “considering the nature of conceptions.” What is at issue, as I see it, is the ontological status of concepts (or “conceptions”). Throughout their paper – and in the Conceptual Change (CC) literature more generally – students are treated as having concepts. This implies, first, that those concepts are relatively stable mental entities and, second, that they are possessed in the same sort of way that other entities might be said to belong to individuals. However, as I shall try to show, the assumptions underlying such locutions are seriously misleading. Concepts are not mental objects, nor do they belong to individuals. To elucidate this second point, it is useful to make a clear distinction between individuals’ knowing and what, within the scientific community, is taken to be known. While knowing is always situated in place and time and occurs as part of a particular