Concept understanding through dialogues: Dealing with the conflicf of scientific knowledge and everyday experience

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine how junior high school students relate scientific concepts to their everyday experience, when the concepts and their experience conflict. In an interview, the Scientific Group (students who had 0upported a scientific concept) were asked to resolve the conflict between that and their everyday experience, and a Naïve Group (who, because of their everyday experience, had supported a naïve concept) were asked to resolve the conflict between that and the scientific concept. Participants in these dialogues, classified according to their method of resolving the task, fell into 3 groups: a scientific resolution group, a scientific non-resolution group, and a naïve non-resolution group. Analysis of the interaction patterns based on transactive dialogues (Berkowitz & Gibbs, 1983) and of the contents of the discussions indicated that, in their dialogues, the scientific resolution group tended to integrate conflicting information, the scientific non-resolution group tended to ignore it, and the naïve resolution group tended to separate the conflicting information from their own opinions. These tendencies during the dialogues were named "coordination," "suppression," and "segregation" of conflicting meaning. We believe that coordination should be an aim of education.