Comparison of Students' Knowledge Structure Coherence and Understanding of Force in the Philippines, Turkey, China, Mexico, and the United States

Abstract

This study investigates the ongoing debate in the conceptual change literature between unitary and elemental perspectives on students' knowledge structure coherence. More specifically, the current study explores two potential explanations for the conflicting results reported by Ioannides and Vosniadou (2002)and diSessa, Gillespie, and Esterly (2004) in terms of differences in coding schemes and differences in student populations. The current study addresses these questions by applying the coding schemes from both studies to interviews with 201 students drawn from the United States, the Philippines, Turkey, China, and Mexico. The analyses focus first on the coding schemes, suggesting that differences in coding schemes seem unlikely to account for the differences in the original studies. The analyses then focus on potential differences between student populations, suggesting that some differences exist in terms of consistency and meanings that might result from language, culture, or educational systems, but that these differences are too small to account for the radical differences in the findings of the original studies. Two additional explanations are then proposed and explored involving the instruments and the epistemological stances invoked for the students. Overall, the results align more closely with the findings of diSessa, Gillespie, and Esterly (2004). [Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Journal of the Learning Sciences for the following free supplement: Coding Schemes and Rules.]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This work was funded by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Douglas Clark.

Notes

¹ P-prims (or phenomenological primitives) are unarticulated explanatory primitives in a student's conceptual ecology that provide the basis for many of the student's explanations about science phenomena (e.g., diSessa, 1993; diSessa & Sherin, 1998).

² Facets are independent explanatory facts or “rules of thumb” that students use to understand and explain situations and phenomena (e.g., Hunt & Minstrell, 1994; Minstrell & Kraus, 2005).

³The descriptions of the colloquial meanings of the terms for force in each language were written by the interviewers involved in this study. As described in “Selection of Countries and Interviewers” in the Methods section, the interviewers were all native speakers of their focal languages. They conducted the interviews as well as the translations. All of the interviewers had completed some or all of their doctoral training in science education at the time of the interviews. Their descriptions were cross-checked by one or more additional native speakers of each language for verification.