What changes in conceptual change?

TLDR

Prior work on conceptual change has been vague and imprecise about what a concept is. The paper reviews conceptual change literature and proposes a theory of a specific type of concept. The authors review literature, define a coordination class as a systematic set of strategies for extracting information, identify its structural and performance components, and apply the theory to student protocol data. Applying the theory to a student’s protocol data provides insights into the concept of force in Newtonian mechanics.

Abstract

This paper has two aims. First, it reviews literature about conceptual change and about the study of concepts more broadly. The principal claim is that much prior work has suffered from inexplicitness and imprecision in terms of what constitutes a concept. Second, we introduce a theory of one particular type of concept. A coordination class is a systematic collection of strategies for reading a certain type of information out from the world. We identify both structural components and performance properties of coordination classes. Using this theory, we analyse protocol data from a student with respect to the difficult concept of force in Newtonian mechanics.