The Problem of Metaconceptual Awareness in Theory Revision

In this paper we report an experiment that investigated the question of whether elementary school children have metaconceptual awareness of theory revision processes. Fiftytwo elementary school children (grades, 1, 3 and 5) were asked to select between phenomenological and scientific depictions of different astronomical phenomena and indicate which of these depictions were closer to “Reality” and which were closer to “Appearance”. The results showed an increase with age in the number of scientific depictions selected. They also showed that the children who selected both phenomenological and scientific representations of the astronomical phenomena were not capable of deciding which depictions best represented “Reality” and which “Appearance”. It is argued that the task requires the ability to understand that the same world situation can be represented in different ways and that children have difficulty understanding the theoretical nature of representations and thus of flexibly manipulating multiple representations of the same physical