Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our goal is to understand the development of physics concepts in students. We take the perspective that individuals construct their o w n understanding so as to 'fit' their experiences. This constructive activity results in conceptions about the physical world. The major challenges in physics instruction then are the tasks of identifying and inducing change in students' conceptions about the physical world. Our efforts to understand the nature of conceptual change are aided by knowledge representation techniques. W e present examples in which some of the finer structure of conceptual change is represented which illustrate the potential of knowledge representation for studying conceptual change.