When reflecting on my classroom experiences, and after reading this week’s articles, I believe I can begin to understand the theories of conceptual change. Particularly that of Posner, “We believe there are analogous patterns of conceptual change in learning. Sometimes students use existing concepts to deal with new phenomena” (p. 212, Posner). In my understanding of the two phases of conceptual change, I had to challenge my basic assumptions and reorganize or replace them to achieve a conceptual change called accommodation. I now have an appreciation and understanding of my discomfort and anxiety in my quantum mechanics class. What I did not realize then, is that these struggles were necessary in the assimilation of new information. Even more so, these moments in my classroom experiences had a label, anomalies.
I resonate with another point Posner makes which is that as science teachers we must take advantage of those anomalies experienced by our students to prepare them for the accommodation. We must also set up our classrooms to align with the idea that we are attempting in our instruction to “produce accommodation in students, rather than merely to help them make sense of new theories”. (p. 225, Posner). We are subsequently tasked then to structure our lessons, activities, experiments, demonstrations, and so forth in a way that will trigger cognitive conflicts in our students, which according to diSessa’s discussion can be used as a resource. Further, he acknowledges that in former theory assumptions, we traditionally attempt to argue a student out of a “misconception” and reject them. He deduces that “instead of rejecting student conceptions, one can pick and choose the most productive student ideas and refine them to create normative concepts” (p. 266, diSessa).
So where does conceptual change fit into last week’s reading from A Framework for K-12 Science Education? Perhaps the normative concepts are the knowledge and practices that all students should learn by the end of high school which is defined within the framework. Our strategies then must encompass what we know about student misconceptions, anomalies, and defensive responses. In essence then, we must “develop the kinds of strategies which teachers could include in their repertoire to deal with student errors and moves that interfere with accommodation” (p. 226, Posner).