Chapter 6, page 94
Another possibility is that Tracey fails to believe the ideas, even though she understands them pretty
well. Tracey understands the teacher when the teacher explains that water can be poured for the same
reason that a bucket of tiny hard seeds can be poured. Just as bird seeds are individually hard but can be
stirred and poured, water molecules are individually hard but can be stirred and poured. Although Tracey
understands this idea, she says to herself, “I don’t really think that water is like bird seed. The teacher
hasn’t shown me any proof that water molecules are hard. I still think water molecules are wet drops of
water.”
The fact that Tracey may understand ideas without believing them complicates her teacher’s efforts
to appraise Tracey’s thinking. If Tracey writes on an exam, “water molecules are hard like bird seed,”
does it mean that Tracey now believes this, or only that Tracey understands this idea, but still believes
something else? Without asking follow-up questions about Tracey’s beliefs, the teacher cannot know
whether or not Tracey believes what she has written down. When asked by researchers, science students
often assert that their real beliefs differ from the scientific ideas they are being taught in topics including
molecular theory, forces and motion, and heat and temperature (Chinn & Samarapungavan, 2001).
People tend to resist changing beliefs in response to new information (Brewer, Chinn, &
Samarapungavan, 1998; Chinn & Brewer, 1993). Beliefs about the social world are particularly resistant
to change. For example, as we discussed in Chapter 5, stereotypes are very resistant to change, even in the
face of evidence that strongly contradicts these stereotypes (Kunda & Oleson, 1995). Similarly, people’s
beliefs about issues such as whether or not capital punishment deters crime tend to be very resistant to
change in response to sociological data about the actual effects of capital punishment on crime (J. Glaser,
2005; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). Beliefs about the natural world are perhaps less resistant to change
than beliefs about the social world, but science students also frequently resist changing beliefs about the
natural world in response to new evidence (Chinn & Brewer, 1993).
Implications for Instruction
When learners’ prior conceptions and beliefs are fundamentally different from the new ideas that
they are trying to learn, we say that learning involves conceptual change. Conceptual change requires
students to develop new conceptions that are different in substantial ways from the prior conceptions.
Many forms of learning do not involve conceptual change. For example, when a child who already
understands the structure of the solar system learns about a new planet (e.g., Uranus), there is no
conceptual change. This is simply an addition of a new fact to one’s knowledge. In contrast, learning
about the concept of fractions entails conceptual change because students must shift from the conceptual
system of natural numbers to the very different conceptual system of fractions.
Promoting conceptual change is one of the major challenges in education. There is no single set of
teaching strategies that will guarantee success. In later chapters, we will explore some advanced teaching
methods that can encourage conceptual change. In this chapter, we will begin by discussing three
relatively simple instructional techniques that can encourage conceptual change.
Provide clear explanations, avoiding ambiguous language. When explaining ideas to their
students, teachers are more likely to promote conceptual change if they provide clear explanations that
avoid ambiguous language. If a teacher tells second graders, “The earth is round like this globe,” she has
made an ambiguous statement that can readily be reinterpreted to fit students’ alternative conceptions.
Children who have the dual-earth conception will think, “Right—that is the second earth somewhere up in
the sky.” Children with the hollow-earth conception will think, “Right—and we live on a flat surface on
the inside of this.” The teacher’s statement is ambiguous because students with two different alternative
conceptions can readily reinterpret her statement to fit their own alternative conceptions.
Even worse, teachers and textbooks can be misleading. A teacher or a textbook that draws pictures of the
earth as shown in Figure 6.5a, with people standing on the top of the earth, seems to confirm students’