Examining the Factors That Influence Students’ Science Learning Processes and Their Learning Outcomes: 30 Years of Conceptual Change Research

Abstract

This study used content analysis to examine the most studied conceptual change factors that influence students' science learning processes and their learning outcomes. The reviewed research included empirical studies published since Posner et al. proposed their conceptual change model 30 years ago (from 1982 to 2011). One hundred sixteen SSCI journal and full text articles were sampled from the Education Resources Information Center database. "Conceptual change" in the title of the articles was used for screening the articles. The results showed that learning outcomes chiefly examined students' conceptual change and their science achievement. The most studied factors influencing conceptual change were associated with instruction and personal reasoning ability. As for instruction, multiple instructional methods were usually integrated in the research, and "conceptual conflict" and "cooperative learning" were found to be gaining the most attention. In addition, certain instructional methods were more frequently linked to specific science subjects. Educators require knowledge of conceptual change theories and strategies. Such information should be more readily available in order to develop teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and help them put it effectively into practice.Keywords: conceptual change, conceptual ecology, content analysis, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), learning factor, learning outcome Correspondence: Mei-Hung Chiu, Graduate Institute of Science Education, National Taiwan Normal University, 88, Sec 4 Ting-Chou Road, 116 Taipei, Taiwan E-mail: mhchiu@ntnu.edu.tw OPEN ACCESSJ.-W. Lin et al. 2618© 2016 iSER, Eurasia J. Math. Sci. & Tech. Ed., 12(9), Examining the Factors That Influence Students' Science Learning Processes and Their Learning Outcomes: 30 Years of Conceptual Change ResearchIt has been 30 years since Posner and his colleagues (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982) proposed the idea about learning requiring for conceptual change. During this period, an increasing number of studies have investigated how and why conceptual change occurs and what the difficulties are in learning scientific concepts across different ages, genders, subjects, and countries. Researchers seem to have reached a consensus on the difficulties associated with conceptual change in school science learning. This raises the question of the extent to which this broad research agenda and emerging findings match what has been published in journals that seek to influence classroom practice and guide science teacher instruction.In an analytical study of citations from 365 identified journal articles on conceptual change (The articles were from the following publications: International Journal of Science Education, International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Research in Science Education, and Science Education), Chiu, Lin, and Chou (2016) found that the top 25 most cited publications (see Appendix A) out of 17,919 citations mainly discussed theorie...

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