ABSTRACT
The research about cognitive change and science teaching in the last two decades has been dominated by two main approaches. Piaget’s theory – mainly his book about formal operations (Inhelder and Piaget 1955) – has had a strong influence during the 1960s and the 1970s. We think that the Piagetian approach is still relevant for studying both cognitive change and science teaching, but in the last fifteen years a number of important criticisms have appeared. Most of them have been based on the existence of the subjects’ alternative ideas or misconceptions about scientific notions (Driver, Guesne, and Tiberghien 1985; West and Pines 1985).
