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Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Learning difficulties resulting from students holding conceptions of scientific concepts which are at variance with those presented in curricular materials have been identified in the literature in a number of areas of science. In this study a number of student learning difficulties related to the concepts of growth and the cell were identified. More specifically, this study was designed to investigate whether alternative conceptions held by students prior to instruction were, in part, responsible for these learning difficulties. The study also investigated whether omissions in instruction contributed to these learning difficulties. Finally, the study examined changes in student conceptions after formal instruction. Through concept analyses of growth and the cell, two semi-structured interview protocols were developed. The Growth Protocol was used to interview students in Grades 3, 5, and 7 and the Cell Protocol was used to interview students in Grade 10. The students in Grades 3 and 10 were interviewed both before and after instruction. The conceptions of the students identified in the transcripts were classified into a number of categories specific to the constituent concepts of growth and the cell. Students at all grade levels were found to hold a wide variety of alternative conceptions regarding the concepts in question. The majority of these alternative conceptions were identified in more than one student and did not reflect current scientific or curricular understandings of growth or the cell. Rather, it seemed that these alternative conceptions reflected student attempts to make sense of concrete experiences with phenomena in their surroundings. After instruction at both the elementary and secondary level, the majority of students did not incorporate most of the scientific concepts as they were presented during instruction. The older students did not hold a conception of cell differentiation nor did the majority of students link the microscopic phenomena of cell division with the macroscopic phenomena of growth in organisms other than humans. The variability of alternative conceptions of mitosis and meiosis after instruction strongly suggested that the students experienced learning difficulties with respect to these concepts. The results of this study imply that in order to effectively move the learner from alternative conceptions to scientific conceptions both curricular and instructional strategies must shift their emphasis from one of presenting only disciplinary knowledge to one of considering also the prior knowledge that the learner brings to the instructional setting. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

For the last fifteen years, research on students' conceptions of physical phenomena has been directing our attention to the value of knowing and considering children's prior ideas in science teaching. Although many who are concerned with science education are aware of and see wisdom in this perspective of teaching, there are many realities, including the content of the discipline, that pose great challenges in translating it into practice in science classes. Currently, in collaboration with teachers, science educators are actively conducting classroom studies. In this process, teachers as researchers are making reflective inquiries into their own students' learning. This study followed a similar framework of research at a microcosmic level. It entailed elicitation of thirteen Grade 11 students' individual prior conceptions of solubility and a teacher-researcher collaboration to incorporate these conceptions in the instruction of a unit on solution chemistry. Consequently, the study presents a phenomenography of solubility, narrates a story about classroom instruction which took students' conceptions into consideration, reports four case studies on students' conceptual growth and changes, and outlines some of the factors that facilitate or constrain collaborative teaching that focuses on student understanding of subject matter. The students' prior conceptions of solubility were categorized into six categories of description: 1. physical transformation from solid to liquid 2. chemical transformation of solute 3. density of solute 4. amount of space available in solution 5. properties of solute 6. size of solute particles With regard to learning chemistry, these conceptualizations made clear four issues: (1) students' explanations were bounded by their perceptions, (2) students extended macroscopic explanations to a microscopic level, (3) students made inappropriate links to previous chemistry learning, and (4) students used the language of chemistry non-discriminately. After studying a unit on solution chemistry, two more categories of description were added to the pre-instructional categories: 1. chemical structure of components 2. solution equilibrium After instruction, the students attributing to the initial six categories of description' diminished in number. The newly acquired conceptions of solubility reflected insufficient explanatory power and were merely overlaid with the chemical language. Learning the language of solution chemistry and acquiring some theoretical understanding of it were reflected in the change between pre- and post-instructional conceptions. This conceptual change can be considered as evolutionary. It was inferred that the abstract and ambiguous nature of chemical theories and principles sets limits to conceptual change teaching. The influences that facilitated the collaborative efforts include: (1) the teacher's attempts to incorporate students' conceptions, (2) the teacher's openness and willingness to assess her own methods of teaching chemistry, (3) the teacher's reflections about the researcher's constructivist teaching, and (4) the researcher's active participation in the classroom interactions. The four most important influences that seriously constrained the collaborative efforts to link students' conceptions with formal chemistry were: (1) the lack of time to devote to the topic of solution chemistry, (2) the lack of teacher time to plan lessons together in order to incorporate students' conceptions, (3) the lack of practical experience on the part of both the researcher and the teacher in developing specific teaching strategies which acknowledged students' prior belief in this content area, and (4) the lack of time to develop common perspectives and a shared language. This study has implications for both teachers and researchers. Specifically, it implies that students' conceptions form an integral component of chemistry instruction—as points of origin for lesson planning and development of curricular materials It also implies that through science educators' modelling and practising in their "teaching and learning" courses, pre- and in-service teachers be challenged to seek answers for epistemological questions such as: What is chemical knowledge? and, How is it acquired? A general implication is that both teachers and researchers, rather than being fence-makers, must strive to be bridge-builders so that they can be learners of each other's theoretical and practical experiences. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1964 H95 / Master of Science

In my thesis, I argue that the philosophical and psychological study of concept-learning mechanisms has failed to take the diversity of learning mechanisms into account, and that consequently researchers should embrace a new way of thinking about concept learning: `concept learning' as a class of psychological mechanisms is not a natural kind lending itself to unified study and should be eliminated. To arrive at this, I discuss several concept-learning models that attempt to overcome Jerry Fodor's challenge and base my judgement on the plurality of feasible concept-learning mechanisms and on criteria for theoretical notions from the philosophy of science. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the topic `concept learning' and highlights its importance as a research topic in the study of the mind. I argue that a mechanistic understanding of the shape of concept learning is best suited to explain the phenomena, in line with the recent resurgence of mechanism-based explanation in the philosophy of mind. As the main challenge to the idea that concepts can be learnt, I proceed to set up Fodor's challenge for concept learning in Chapter 2. This challenge is the idea that concepts cannot be learnt given the logically possible mechanisms of concept learning. I lay out the argumentative structure and background assumptions that support Fodor's argument, and propose to scrutinise his empirically based premise most closely in my thesis: this empirically based premise is that the only possible mechanism of concept learning is the process of forming and testing hypotheses. As replies to Fodor's challenge, I discuss Perceptual Learning (R. Goldstone), Perceptual Meaning Analysis (J. Mandler), Quinean Bootstrapping (S. Carey), pattern-governed learning (W. Sellars), joint-attentional learning (M. Tomasello), and the Syndrome-Based Sustaining Mechanism Model (E. Margolis and S. Laurence). I argue that almost every mechanism I discuss has some leverage against Fodors argument, suggesting that there may be a wide variety of non-hypothesis-based concept-learning mechanisms. The final chapter of my thesis, Chapter 7, takes a step back and reviews the fate of the notion of concept learning in light of the diverse set of learning mechanisms brought up in my thesis. My first and main worry is that it is questionable whether the previously discussed mechanisms of concept learning share many scientifically relevant properties that would justify seeing them as instances of the natural kind 'concept learning mechanism'. I argue that the substantiation of this worry would necessitate the elimination of 'concept learning' and 'concept-learning mechanism' as terms of the cognitive sciences. The chapter lays out the argumentative structure on which Concept Learning Eliminativism (CLE) rests, along with a discussion of questions about natural kinds and pragmatics in theory construction. This is inspired by Edouard Machery's argument for the elimination of 'concept', but independent of Machery's own project. With this in place, I go on to give a conclusive argument that supports CLE, based on the claims that 'concept learning' is not a natural kind and that there are pragmatic advantages to eliminating 'concept learning'. In this final chapter, I also raise pragmatic considerations that support the argument for CLE, and propose new research directions that could pro t from the eliminativist position.

An interest in the development of alternative instructional methods for learning disabled adolescents has emerged within the last few years. Intervention studies examining the effects of cognitive or learning strategies have been proposed as viable alternatives for facilitating the learning of learning disabled youth. This study addressed a specific cognitive or learning strategy entitled "mapping" for improving text recall. Subjects were four diagnosed learning disabled adolescents receiving support services within a high school resource classroom. The design for the study was the A-B-A-B-C design utilized in single subject research. The study consisted of administration of daily text passages and corresponding text passage exams. Each subject was individually trained to utilize the mapping strategy which required the students to take the key concepts presented in the text and develop a diagrammatic representation of these concepts. A self-graphing procedure was utilized to maintain the use of the trained strategy. The results concerning the effectiveness of the mapping strategy indicate that the utilization of the strategy will increase recall of text information among learning disabled adolescents. Maintenance of the trained strategy was demonstrated by two of the four subjects. The two remaining subjects who failed to demonstrate maintenance of the strategy were introduced to the self-graphing procedure. These subjects indicated that a graphic display of exam scores may not be sufficient to develop strategy maintenance. Educational and research implications were discussed.

A new one-semester tertiary bridging course in chemistry was designed with constructivist concept-learning as a major aim. This aim was monitored by Concept Learning Test Sequences (CLTSs), developed for each of ten fundamental chemical concept-clusters, selected from ten theory-practical work-units of an expressly written book. The concept-clusters were: density, mixture/compound, structure/bonding, base/salt, redox, mole, rate, metal, halogen, hydrocarbon. Each CLTS comprised a pre-instruction item; two-tier multiple-choice item(s); a post-instruction item; each provided data from a class of 21 students of widely different backgrounds. Separate chapters discuss class results and individual results.Concept-learning Improvement Categories that estimated individual improvement in each CLTS were quantified by assigning numerical values. Summation of these numerical values for all ten CLTSs produced individual Concept-learning Improvement Indices (CLIIs). Improvement in concept-learning appears independent of prior academic background. Rankings by CLIIs and by final assessment percentage were strongly correlated. The mean CLII for the class assessed concept-learning improvement (per concept) at Moderate-to-Intermediate.Various probes revealed that factors which influenced learning included: pre-laboratory reports; practical work; learning partnership(s); positive personal qualities; mathematical skills; confidence; visualisation; integration of theoretical and practical studies; bench problem-solving; a relaxed tutorial atmosphere; historical approaches to chemical concepts. Students assessed the course overall as 'good'.

In this thesis, we study the development of linguistic concepts (corresponding to a subset of nouns, verbs and adjectives) on a humanoid robot. To accomplish this goal, we use affordances, a notion first proposed by J.J. Gibson to describe the action possibilities offered to an agent by the environment. Using the affordances formalization framework of Sahin et al., we have implemented a learning system on a humanoid robot and obtained the required data from the sensorimotor experiences of the robot. The system we developed (1) can learn verb, adjective and noun concepts, (2) represent them in terms of strings of prototypes and dependencies based on affordances, (3) can accurately recognize the concept of novel objects and events, and (4) can be used for tasks such as goal emulation and multi step planning.

The ability to recognize sameness among objects and events is a prerequisite for abstraction and forming concepts about what one has learned; thus, identity and nonidentity learning can be considered the backbone of higher-order human cognitive abilities. Discovering identity relations between the constituent properties of objects is an important ability that often characterizes the comparisons that humans make so it is important to devote attention to understanding how nonhuman primates process and conceptualize part-identity as well as whole-identity. Because the ability to generalize the results of learning is to what concepts ultimately reduce, the series of experiments herein first investigated responding to part-identity and -nonidentity and whole-identity and -nonidentity and then explored the generality of such learning to the formation of concepts about color, shape, and cardinal number. The data from Experiments 1, 2, and 3 indicated that the two orangutans learned to respond concurrently to color whole-identity and -nonidentity and they responded faster to color whole-identity. Additionally, both subjects learned to respond concurrently to color and shape part- and whole-identity and for the most part, it was easier for them to do so with color part- and whole-identity problems than shape part- and whole-identity problems. Further, their learned responses to color and shape part- and whole-identity fully transferred to novel color part-identity problems for both subjects and fully transferred to novel color and shape whole-identity problems for one orangutan. The data from Experiments 4, 5, and 6 showed that one subject learned to judge numerical identity when both irrelevant dimensions were cue-constant, but the subject did not do the same when one or more irrelevant dimensions were cue-ambiguous. Further, the subject's accuracy was affected by the numerical distance and the numerical total of comparisons during acquisition of the conditional discrimination. The subject subsequently formed a domain-specific concept about numerical identity as evinced by the transfer of learning to novel numerosities instantiated with novel, cue-constant element colors and shapes and novel numerosities instantiated with cue-constant, familiar element colors and shapes. Given the adaptive significance of using concepts, it is important to investigate if and how nonhuman primates form identity concepts for which they categorize or classify the stimuli around them. This dissertation provided evidence about the extent to which orangutans learned to respond to color, shape, and number identity and nonidentity and subsequent concept formation from such learning. The findings from this study will help in understanding the convergence and divergence in the expression abstraction in the primate phylogeny, thus, informing our understanding about the origins and mechanisms of cognition in human and nonhuman primates.