Why Is It Difficult to Achieve Conceptual Change? Self-Contained Reasoning as a Factor Preventing Hypothetical Judgment

Abstract

The present study examines, from the perspective of learners' reasoning, difficulties associated with transforming existing knowledge. According to the rational model, in order to change existing knowledge, learners have to engage in not only intuitive judgment based on their existing knowledge, but also hypothetical judgment based on rules, and then they have to compare those two. However, Sato & Kudo (2015, in Japanese) found that it was difficult for learners to make that comparison. In the present study, after university students were told about the importance and method of hypothetical judgment, they were asked to judge tasks that required reserving intuitive judgment and promoting reasoning based on hypothetical judgment. The results indicated that (a) there was selfcontained reasoning for which the starting point of inference originated in intuitive judgment, and which generated an explanation to support the reasoning, and (b) self-contained reasoning was suppressed when it was possible to base hypothetical judgments on the learners' process of reasoning, with the result that the possibility of comparing the processes increased. Effects of conventional teaching strategies and the teaching-learning conditions for achieving knowledge transformation are discussed.