MCAT Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior: Passage 6 — Flashcards

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Adult students' ideas about scientific phenomena are strongly held and resistant to change. In the 1980s, a group of science educators came up with a theory of 'conceptual change' to explain how these resistant scientific concepts could be changed via science instruction. They called this process accommodation, based on an earlier theory of 'equilibration.' The reason scientific conceptions are so resistant to change is that when new science content is learned, the learner's brain changes the new content to fit what the learner already knows and believes about science content. However, the science educators proposed a four-part process as a model for instructors to use to change existing misconceptions held by the learners. This process includes making concepts intelligible, meaning they make sense to the learners. They must also be made plausible to the learner, meaning the new concepts are believable. They must also be fruitful, meaning that the new concepts can be used to understand future phenomena they experience, as well as future science concepts. And, finally, they must be dissatisfied with their existing misconceptions. The authors, however, stated that these are conditions for learning and that it is a piecemeal and gradual process. They stated that all four conditions must be present for a misconception to be changed. Science educators since then have used the theory to create and test new instructional models based on the four conditions for conceptual change.