Determining the Intra‐personal Meaning of ‘Regulation’ and ‘Equilibrium’ by means of Analyses of Subjects' Associate Fields

Abstract

The concepts ‘regulation’ and ‘equilibrium’ are basic and central in biology and biology‐teaching. Assessment of pupils' achievement however, elicits ‘the culturally standardised’, i.e. denotative meaning of concepts, not the intra‐personal, connotative meaning. In this study a free‐association method was employed in order to probe respondents' associative field and thus to obtain some information about their cognitive structure. Pupils at the 6th, 9th and 11th grade levels, and comparison groups of (student‐) teachers of biology comprised the study population. It was found that pupils’ (and to a lesser degree (student‐) teachers') associative meaning of these terms did not coincide with the expected ‘representation or embodiment of subject matter’, in particular as regards their ecological and homeostatic aspects.