ABSTRACT
Developmental psychologists have produced a vast literature on how children’s initial concepts emerge and change over the course of development. Within this conceptual change literature, one of the favorite topics is the development of scientific concepts such as heat, gravity, animacy, mechanics, and so on. In this chapter, we present a description of a different kind of conceptual change; one in which the focal concept has to do with the very nature of our enterprise-the translation of basic knowledge about scientific thinking into classroom lessons. Moreover, the entities who underwent this change are not the children in our studies, but rather us-the authors of this chapter.
