Tamer Amin

The goal for this fellowship year is to finalize a book on how to develop an understanding of scientific concepts. This study will synthesize research from a number of different disciplines: science education, developmental psychology and cognitive science.

Abundant literature on conceptual change in science education has provided insights on how scientific concepts are learned and how they should be taught. In developmental psychology, we find accounts on the origins of concepts in infancy and the process of change. In cognitive science, research on scientific expertise has demonstrated the conceptual reorganization taking place as expertise is acquired. These claims have been recently criticized and complemented by research highlighting the role of imagery and physical intuitions in expertise. Moreover, research in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics has converged on the idea that understanding abstract concepts is grounded in perception and action—i.e. that concept representation is embodied. One version of this idea, expressed in the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual metaphor, is that abstract concepts are often construed metaphorically in terms of knowledge structures that emerge from sensorimotor experience.

There still is no unified account that brings together the progress made in these diverse disciplines. We rarely find attempts to identify consensus within disciplines. Even rarer are cross-disciplinary, theoretically coherent syntheses on how to develop an understanding of scientific concepts. The proposed study makes a contribution to filling these gaps.

It will tackle the question of how to understand scientific concepts on a broad metatheoretical level as well as on a narrower, more theoretical level within particular conceptual domains. On the metatheoretical level, it will synthesize current understanding within the fields of science education, developmental psychology and cognitive science regarding the nature of concept representation. It will also try to show how concepts are used in the context of reasoning and problem solving, and how novel conceptual understanding emerges. The metatheoretical synthesis will thus describe a broad theoretical framework and will then be used to propose specific accounts of how understanding evolves in three specific domains: the particulate theory of matter, energy, and the theory of evolution by natural selection.