Theorizing Concept Learning in Physics Education Research: Progress and Prospects

Research on conceptual change addresses the question of how the conceptual resources that learners bring to the context of formal instruction are transformed into conceptual understanding consistent with the accepted knowledge in some domain. Research has been conducted on conceptual change in domains such as science, mathematics, history, and economics. Physics represents an important scientific domain in conceptual change research, as many of the core theoretical perspectives that have been developed have their roots in investigations of K-16 physics learning. Over the years, many reviews have synthesized this literature in a variety of different ways. In our review, we complement this large body of prior reviews by building a multi-layer landscape of current work, so as to unpack the multiple dimensions and types of knowledge involved in conceptual change. The landscape we offer is grounded in the foundational work on the nature of concepts and conceptual change, our first layer of analysis. Then, the second and the third layers address, respectively, the role of representations (such as language, visual representations and simulations, equations, and gesture) in concept representation and learning, and the interplay between the epistemological practices of explaining, modeling and arguing and conceptual change. We then review the literature on the relationship between conceptual change, metacognition and student’s epistemologies, the fourth layer of analysis. Lastly, we turn to a fifth layer that expands the scope even further to examine how learner identity interacts with concept learning in disciplinary domains.