Introduction
With his idea that the most important factor influencing learning is what a learner already knows, Ausubel could in some ways be argued to have started a new and still ongoing research area at the end of the 1960s: conceptual change. Since then, a very large volume of research has addressed students’ understanding of a given topic and how it changes with different ages or as a result of instruction. The notions of “concept” or “conception” are used to describe a certain piece of knowledge which has to be learned by a student (concept) or refer to the understanding a student holds at a particular point in time (conception, alternative conception, or misconception). “Conceptual change” describes and assesses how naïve, nonscientific, or “wrong” conceptions develop to become improved, scientific or “correct” concepts. Predominantly, research on conceptual change is based on a constructivist epistemology assuming that concepts are a result of personal or social constructions.
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von Aufschnaiter, C., Rogge, C. (2015). Conceptual Change in Learning. In: Gunstone, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2150-0_99
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