Concepts

In thinking about the learner’s existing knowledge in terms of concepts we are putting forward an idea of mental structures in someone's head. The aim of teaching and learning is to change these mental structures, hence the term 'Conceptual Change'. More recently, teachers are using the idea of ‘threshold concepts’ to unpack overloaded curricula and decide what are the really key ideas that students need to focus on.

These theories are explored further in Tool 1 of education theories on learning by Jenni Case (2008) .

In the Engineering Subject Centre Guide: Learning and Teaching Theory for Engineering Academics, Houghton (2004) examines the view that:

Different conceptions are all equally valid and there is no such thing as right and wrong …?

The view that all knowledge is relative and that “your theories are as valid as mine” is quite popular in some areas, but it doesn't work in engineering.

First we must appreciate that what we are doing in higher education is acculturating students into our discipline, i.e. we are adopting them into our culture and helping them to adapt to it. This has major consequences.

It may be fashionable to suggest that different people's theories about how the world works are equally valid and to take the idea that we all construct our own mental structure of ideas (cognitive structure) to mean that everybody's cognitive structure is completely different. It is certainly true that everyone has his or her own unique cognitive structure. This is inevitable since each person's individual cognitive structure is the total result of his or her unique life experience. But, if we are to communicate and work with each other, we have to share common ideas. Parts of our cognitive structures must be similar enough to the relevant parts of other people's cognitive structures to make this possible. If we don't share common conceptions of what a resistor is, what potential difference is, what stress and strain are, for example, we cannot make any progress together. Indeed, a very large part of the training of engineers is learning a whole set of man-made conventions and standards so that they can work productively within the existing engineering community.

Just as we must all share the same conception of what symbols on an engineering drawing mean, we also need to share conceptions of the scientific principles upon which our subject is based. Now, scientific “principles” are not usually intuitive. If they were, Aristotelian physics would not have held sway for 2,000 year until Newton put forward his models of mechanics etc. Scientific “principles” are actually made-made conceptions that have proved useful for prediction, have been tested many times and not yet been falsified or shown to be inaccurate for the purposes they are being used for. To an engineer, arguing whether Bernoulli's equation is “correct” is not really worthwhile. What matters is that it is useful. What matters is that we can use Bernoulli's equation to help us design aircraft wings, for example. We can only do this if, rather than adopting any theory of fluid dynamics we create for ourselves, we come to share Bernoulli's conception. Of course, an engineer would argue that any individual's theory that leads to designing an aircraft that doesn't fly is not valid, or at least not useful.

What we are doing in teaching engineering is helping students to construct in their minds the same conceptions that are already shared by the rest of the engineering community. To be sure, it is highly desirable that they are critical of these conceptions and are prepared to propose ways in which they can be improved. This is how the most able eventually contribute to the community's developing set of theories. However it is rather difficult to persuade a whole community that a theory or model needs to be changed to something new, if you don't already have a very good grasp of the current shared conception. The first step, and the job of an undergraduate programme in engineering, is to acculturate students into the engineering community by helping them to share the community's current conceptions and ways of thinking.

What we are doing when we teach scientific principles is not actually teaching students how the world really works. We are teaching them our shared conception or model of how the world works. We cannot teach our students what the world is; only how we see the world. This is an important distinction, because although we may not be able to define right and wrong as regards what the world is, we can define right and wrong as regards students' conceptions of our models of the world. We are entitled to insist that students must come to what we consider to be a correct understanding of our models of the world, to share our conceptions, and to describe other ways of looking at these models as misconceptions. It also means that we don't have to think that students should always “discover” how the world works for themselves. This is totally unrealistic anyway - it has taken countless people thousands of years to develop the models we now use in modern engineering, and even an Einstein cannot achieve even a fraction of this learning by himself. And for much of the time what we want to happen is not that the individual develops their own theory of how the world works, but that they come to share our existing theory.

Source

The chapter above was taken from Houghton, Warren (2004) Engineering Subject Centre Guide: Learning and Teaching Theory for Engineering Academics. Loughborough: HEA Engineering Subject Centre.

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Concepts

In the Engineering Subject Centre Guide: Learning and Teaching Theory for Engineering Academics, Houghton (2004) examines the view that:

Different conceptions are all equally valid and there is no such thing as right and wrong …?

Source

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