the psychology of learning and motivation - Percepts and Concepts ...

238 Andrew F. Heckler4.1. Limitation 1: patterns are typically assumed to be causedby high-level mental structures and processesI would like to emphasize that the critical question addressed in thischapter is ‘‘What causes student incorrect answer patterns to sciencequestions?’’ This is a question about an empirical observation that allows abroad range of possible explanations. In contrast, the typical approach tothe empirical evidence is to assume that the patterns are caused by ‘‘higherlevel’’ mental structures such as concepts, schemas, mental models, orloose collections of pieces of knowledge (e.g., Carey, 1985; Driver &Erickson, 1983; McCloskey, 1983; Novak, 2002; J. P. Smith, diSessa, &Roschelle, 1993; Vosniadou, 1994). 3 These approaches tend instead to askquestions such as ‘‘What are the student concepts that explain the answerpatterns?’’ or ‘‘How are incorrect concepts learned?’’ These questions arenot directly about empirical observations of answering patterns, ratherthey are questions about inferences about the observations. In short, thetypical approach to the empirical observation of incorrect answeringpattern is to already assume the cause of the patterns, namely, that theyare a result of some high-order mental structure such as concepts ormental models.The origin of this assumption may be traced back to Piaget (1952/1936, 1972/1970), who argued that scientific knowledge cannot belearned from sensory information alone, but rather requires explicithigher order thinking and interaction with the world in order to formhigh-level mental schemas necessary for scientific knowledge (see alsoDriver et al., 1994; Leach & Scott, 2003; Taber, 2010; Vosniadou,1996). 4 Therefore, the argument goes: since higher level structures ofknowledge are needed to understand science, such mental structuresare needed to answer science questions in a correct and consistentmanner.However, the topic of this chapter is not directly about the origins ornature of scientific knowledge, it is about the origins of incorrect answeringpatterns to science questions. While one might agree that answeringscience questions consistently correctly may require correct higher levelmental structures, answering incorrectly in patterned ways does not necessarilyrequire a higher level mental structure. The patterns could becaused or strongly influenced by more basic, bottom-up processes that areimplicit and relatively unknown to the answerer.In other words, even if we assume that consistently correct answeringoccurs if and only if the answerer holds the correct concept (let us ignore3 Some models, such as Vosniadou’s (1994) framework theory, include lower level unconscious aspects to theproposed mental structure.4 Note that there is also much discussion about the difference between individual cognition and socialcognition (e.g., Leach & Scott, 2003), which we will not discuss here.