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Conceptual change is the process whereby concepts and relationships between them change over the course of an individual person’s lifetime or over the course of history. Research in three different fields – cognitive developmental psychology, science education, and history and philosophy of science - has sought to understand this process. Indeed, the convergence of these three fields, in their effort to understand how concepts change in content and organization, has led to the emergence of an interdisciplinary sub-field in its own right. This sub-field is referred to as “conceptual change” research. == Origins == Within cognitive developmental psychology, the interest in conceptual change was motivated by problems identified in the stage theory of cognitive development proposed by Jean Piaget.〔Carey, S. (1985). Are children fundamentally different kinds of thinkers and learners than adults? In S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal, and R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.〕〔Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.〕 Piaget claimed that the developing child passed through a series of four distinct stages of thought and that concept development reflected these broad transitions between stages. However, it increasingly became apparent that children’s conceptual development was best described in terms of distinct developmental trajectories for each conceptual domain considered (e.g. knowledge about number, knowledge about the motion and interaction of inanimate objects, and knowledge about goal-directed intentional entities). The term “conceptual change” was increasingly used as work on these distinct developmental trajectories led to the discovery that a variety of types of changes occur in the content and organization of concepts. In parallel, researchers in science education were learning that one of the main reasons students often found scientific concepts like force and energy difficult to understand was the intuitive concepts about the natural world that students brought with them to the classroom.〔Driver, R. & Easley, J. (1978). Pupils and paradigms: a review of literature related to concept development in adolescent science students. Studies in Science Education, 5, 61-84.〕〔Novick, S. & Nussbaum, J (1981) Pupils' understanding of the particulate nature of matter: a cross age study. Science Education, 65, 187-196.〕 It became clear that students were assimilating the scientific ideas presented to them in the classroom into their existing concepts, resulting in what came to be referred to as “misconceptions”. Researchers in science education turned to the task of identifying these pre-instruction ideas and sought instructional strategies that would succeed in helping student transform their intuitive concepts into more scientific alternatives. These developments in cognitive developmental psychology and science education occurred against a background of (and were influenced by) developments within the history and philosophy of science. Arguably, most important, was the novel approach to how scientific concepts and theories change over the course of history put forward by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions〔Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.〕 In this book, Kuhn argued that changes in the scientific understanding of the natural world should not be seen as a gradual, incremental progress toward ever better understanding. He pointed out that it is sometimes very difficult to characterize how a more recent concept is better than a predecessor. The reason for the difficulty is that the successive concepts are embedded in a distinct set of relationships with other concepts and investigative techniques. Thus, the content of the two concepts and relationships to others can be so different that it is inappropriate to compare the two successor concepts directly with one another. An important concept to emerge from this reasoning was the idea of a “paradigm.” Commentators have noted that Kuhn used the term in a number of different senses. However, one sense seems to have had the most influence on what came to be referred to as “conceptual change research.” That is, the idea of a “paradigm” understood as an integrative set of theoretical concepts and methods taken for granted by a particular research community. According to Kuhn, most of scientists’ work is conducted within a paradigm (what Kuhn called “normal science”). Occasionally, however, insurmountable problems lead scientists to question the paradigm’s assumptions, and a new paradigm emerges (what Kuhn called “a paradigm shift”). Kuhn’s work, and that of other philosophers and historians of science, had a substantial influence on cognitive developmental〔Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.〕 and science education research.〔Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A. , Hewson, P. W. , Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education 66(2), 211-227.〕 Increasingly, children and students’ concepts were seen as embedded within their own set of relationships with other concepts and the developmental or learning task came to be seen as a kind of paradigm shift. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Conceptual change」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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