A topic in Learners' conceptions and thinking
What are concepts?
"Three diseases plague and may forever plague our conceptual outfit: shortage of rich concepts, abundance of poor ones, and vagueness of all except the strictly formal ones."
Mario Bunge
If you can talk about, or even think about, a category of object or phenomenon, then you have a concept. You can have a concept of tea spoons (that allows you to discriminate tea spoons from things that are not tea spoons), or Sunday, or charity, or electromagnetic induction, or renaissance painters, or…
Concepts can relate to material, abstract, and even imaginary, things. So there can be concepts such as helicopter (material), inflation (abstract) or unicorns (imaginary).
There are different accounts of what concepts are, so here is one characterisation:
- Concepts act as categories
- Concepts are abstractions from experience
- Concepts are mental entities
- Concepts are tools used in thinking
- Concepts are only apparent when activated
- Concepts act as nodes in a conceptual network
(This is the account I have set out in detail in The Nature of the Chemical Concept: Constructing chemical knowledge in teaching and learning.)
Concepts in the curriculum
A curriculum specification may set out certain concepts that learners should be taught about – perhaps including:
- halogens
- electromagnets
- kidneys
- bacteria
- mitochondrial Eve
- ideal gases
- …
Ideal gases do not actually exist, but we can imagine what counts, and what does not count, as an ideal gas. We can do calculations about notional samples of an ideal gas. Mitochondrial Eve is a conjectured person who was the first human who was the direct ancestor of all of us on the maternal line (your mother's mother's mother's mother's …): there can only have been one of her, but we can still have a concept of her, just as we can have a concept of the first winner of the Nobel physics prize. If we think of concepts relating to sets, then some of these sets have one member (mitochondrial Eve; the first winner of the Nobel physics prize…) and some are empty sets when we think of real objects (a pure ionic bond; an ideal gas).
Personal conceptions
If we imagine a class of students being taught about photosynthesis (or substitute your preferred example here), they may all be present for the same teaching, but each learner will bring their own background knowledge of the topic informed by things they read or heard or programmes they've seen and so on; different levels of prerequisite knowledge needed to fully understand the teaching as it was intended; different access to the language of the teacher; different funds of interpretive resources (past experiences, images, metaphors, analogies etc.) for making sense of teaching*; and they may have different levels of motivation and concentration, and so on. After teaching, each of the students will have their own concept of photosynthesis, and likely there will subtle differences between them. They will each have their own conceptions of photosynthesis, some of which will be inconsistent with the target knowledge the teacher set out to teach (i.e., alternative conceptions).
Read about alternative conceptions
We can refer to scientific concepts as canonical concepts – the official versions – what scientists mean by compound, torque, primate, etc., but most people's versions of these concept, their conceptions, tend to be somewhat different from the canonical concepts: they may be less precise, less details, missing important details, and sometimes inconsistent with the canonical accounts.
For example, a scientific concept of heat may refer to energy in the process of being transferred due to a difference in temperature, but a student's conception of heat may be the energy that a hot body has (or perhaps, with somewhat more more sophistication, the energy that a hot body has by virtue of being hot), which is an alternative conception that is inconsistent with the canonical concept.
This account is informed by a perspective known as constructivism:
