ABSTRACT
If you look at many of the books written about science education, you will find wide discussion of ideas such as misconceptions, concept maps, conceptual progress and concepts of learning. Surprisingly, there is much less attention paid to explaining what a concept is. For the purpose of this chapter, I am going to use the term ‘concept’ to mean a mental generalization about a class of instances or specific examples. The mental generalization serves to distinguish the concept from similar concepts, to test whether a new instance is an example of the concept, and to use the concept to construct a network of related concepts or a schema. Many concepts can be constructed directly by generalizing from experience of many instances. Often, though, concepts are presented directly and then exemplified.
