Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do students link school and personal experiences to develop a useful account of complex science topics? Can science courses provide a firm foundation for lifelong science learning? To answer these questions we analyze how "Pat" integrates and differentiates ideas and develops models to explain complex, personally-relevant experience with thermal phenomena. We examine Pat's process of conceptual change during an 8th grade science class where a heat flow model of thermal events is introduced as well as after studying biology in ninth grade and after studying chemistry in the 11th grade. Pat regularly links new ideas from science class and personal experience to explain topics like insulation and conduction or thermal equilibrium. Thus Pat links experience with home insulation to experiments using wool as an insulator. This linkage leads Pat to consider "air pockets" as a factor in insulation and to distinguish insulators (with air pockets) from metal conductors that "attract heat." These linkages help Pat construct a heat flow account of thermal events and connect it to the microscopic model introduced in chemistry. Pat's process of conceptual change demonstrates how longitudinal case studies contribute to the understanding of conceptual development. Future work will synthesize the conceptual change process of all 40 students we have studied longitudinally.