Memory content of scientific concepts in beginning university science students

Abstract

This study examines the characteristics of the content of scientific concepts stored in memory by beginning university science students. The features of this representation are examined and compared to the memory content of abstract non-scientific concepts shown by previous studies. Property generation task, a tool extensively used in identifying conceptual content, was used for this purpose. The findings show that the content of scientific concepts stored in memory by beginning university students is characterised by a predominance of entity properties along with, to a lesser extent, situation and introspective properties. This stands in contrast to previous findings about non-scientific abstract concepts, where situation properties are predominant. The implications of this finding on the acquisition and use of scientific concepts are discussed.

Keywords:

• scientific concepts
• concept properties
• knowledge representation
• memory content

Notes

1. We have tried to maintain a distinction between the use of a term, such as ‘energy’, in everyday contexts, and the use of the corresponding scientific concept. The use of the term ‘energy’ in non-scientific contexts may not correspond to the proper use of the scientific concept, ‘energy’. Therefore, although we sometimes use the expressions ‘restricted-use concepts’ and ‘general-use scientific concepts’ for simplicity, these should be understood as ‘concepts associated to restricted-use terms’ and ‘concepts associated to general-use terms’.