ABSTRACT
Many of the major revolutions in the history of science can be thought of as changes in the conceptual understanding of the world (Dunbar & Fugelsang, 2005a, 2005b; Nersessian, 1998; Thagard, 1992, 2003). In addition to entire fields in science, individual students and scientists can be seen to change their conceptual structures as they acquire new information, whether it be theoretical, methodological, or empirical, in a scientific field. Understanding this conceptual change, both within individuals and within scientific fields, is thus central to our understanding of science, science education, and the scientific mind. The acquisition of new theories and data are clearly at the heart of conceptual change, but what methods can we use to determine what happens when conceptual change occurs, and how can we use this knowledge to better inform the educational system? One approach has been to couch our understanding of concepts and conceptual structures in terms of changes in symbolic representations using the techniques, models, and theories of cognitive science. Many of the excellent chapters in this volume pursue this approach
(e.g., Klahr, this volume); however, following our previous work integrating naturalistic research and cognitive models (Dunbar, 1995; Blanchette & Dunbar, 2001; Fugelsang, Stein, Green, & Dunbar, 2004) we use converging methods to understand conceptual change. A combination of traditional cognitive methods and contemporary brain imaging techniques are used to determine how new concepts are acquired, how theory and data are combined, and what happens when conceptual change occurs.
