Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper claims that, contrary to the "Theory oriented" approach to cognitive development and instruction, children's informal concepts play important roles in learning, and reports two cases that support the constructivist view of learning. It is widely believed that children's knowledge about various domains is organized into coherent systems, i.e., theories. Although this approach provides a new perspective on knowledge organization, too much emphasis on the conceptual difference makes the interaction of prior knowledge and learning materials impossible. Without the interaction, learned rules remained uninterpreted. Consequently they can be applied only to a restricted set of problems. A case from mathematics revejJed that students' informal concept of concentration can be bridged to the formad one, by rewording quantitative terms in problems with quzditative terms. A case from physics showed that by combining fragmentJiry understandings, students could acquire the concept of force decomposition which is difficult to learn by formal instruction. Finally, instructional techniques are proposed that make use of informal concepts as a partial base analog to enrich students' understanding.