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

260 Andrew F. Hecklerscience questions commonly found in textbooks and classroom tests. Thefact that responses to these questions may be strongly influenced byautomatic bottom-up processes in many students has double-edgedimplications. First, it calls into question the presumed validity of thesequestions, since they were meant to test the extent to which students haveexplicit understanding of a particular scientific concept. However, theseand similar questions, such as those used on well-vetted concept inventories,(e.g., Ding, Chabay, Sherwood, & Beichner, 2006; Hestenes,Wells, & Swackhammer, 1992), have often been validated through studentinterviews to ensure that the large majority of students can explicitlyexplain their answer choice. That is to say, these multiple choice questionsdo often reflect students’ explicit understanding as interpreted by theirexplanations.Therefore, the second implication of the influence of bottom-upprocesses on answering patterns is to call into question what is meantby understanding of a concept. Any claim about ‘‘student understanding’’or ‘‘what a student is thinking’’ can only be operationally defined by orinferred from student performance on a task, be it the response to aninformal question in class, to a multiple choice question on a test, or thesuccess on a semester-long group project. If, as is suggested in thischapter and in the work on dual systems discussed in Section 6, theperformance on these tasks is inevitably influenced by unconscious,automatic, bottom-up processes, then our understanding of understandinga science concept must include both explicit reasoning and automatic,bottom-up processes. One might say that both ‘‘System 1’’ and ‘‘System2’’ are a necessary part of what we operationally mean by understandinga science concept, as they both may influence performance on any taskrelevant to the science concept. Indeed, a significant portion of expertscience knowledge may be implicit (cf. Evans, Clibbins, Cattani, Harris, &Dennis, 2003).If bottom-up processes do play an important role in understandingof a science concept, then this suggests that one should utilize methodsof instruction that align these process with goals of explicit reasoning(cf. Brace et al., 2006; Goldstone et al., 2010; Kellman et al., 2010). Forexample, students may be better able to understand the meaning oftangent slopes on a graph if they can process them as quickly as positionson a graph. Or if one is to reason that velocity is not in the direction offorce, this may be facilitated if such examples were highly available inmemory due to repeated practice examples.The goal of this chapter was to investigate the potential role of automatic,bottom-up processes in the well-known phenomenon of patternsof incorrect answering to science concept questions. It seems clear thatbottom-up processes can play an important role in student answering, anddisregarding such processes risks ignoring a plausible opportunity to