The Cognitive Model of Science and the Use of Concepts Mapping in the Study of Scientific Paradigm Transposition – The Case of Black Body Radiation

Abstract

Conceptual mapping will be generalized and used to perform the analysis of how knowledge produced in the 'academic spheres' change, adapt, is simplified and consolidate as knowledge to be taught in the classroom. We will study here how the topic of physics called blackbody radiation is transposed to the textbooks. We analyze the main concepts used by Max Planck (1901) in the development of the theory of blackbody radiation and how they were transcribed, filtered and drawn up in textbooks made for the junior and senior years of the Bachelor of Science in Physics course, for the freshman and sophomore years of an university course and for high school. That is, as the three (3) chapters of Planck’s article condense into a single section in high school textbooks. We will use here a generalized version of Concept Mapping (MSSK) to analyze how the didactic transposition of this theory is made in the generalized definition made by Izquierdo-Aymerich (2003) and synthesized by Author (2017a) of Chevallard theory (1991). We analyze, using as a theoretical framework the cognitive science theory and the theory of Scientific Revolutions of Thomas Kuhn (1970), as the fact that the theory for blackbody radiation has been proposed before the paradigm of quantum mechanics was established affected the epistemological construction of this article and as this fact has been transposed to textbooks. We will demonstrate that MSSK is the natural tool to study the "Transposition Paradigms" in Science. It is proved the thesis that textbooks for high school are a didactic transposition of university books and not from scientific articles.

The Unification of Didactic Transposition Theory with the Didactic Situation Theory of Brousseau

“…And the mathematics books for business and economics courses. De Mello [9,10] demonstrated that DT for the basic cycle occurs from these texts and not from the original articles. Thus a theory of DT should study and track how the knowledge or scholar Knowledge is transformed in this epistemosphere to become the Knowledge to be Taught.…”

“…It can be shown that as knowledge is transformed, updating and adapting to a certain level of knowledge their explanatory models will be adjusting to the knowledge level of the target audience and to the current scientific paradigm. De Mello demonstrated that due to scientific theories be developed through concepts, called nodes or links by Latour [10], the conceptual mapping is the natural and most appropriated tool to perform this analysis [4,9,10]. As mentioned in the literature [10] with the expansion of the publishing market we have today a relative variety of textbooks produced within this epistemosphere.…”

“…De Mello demonstrated that due to scientific theories be developed through concepts, called nodes or links by Latour [10], the conceptual mapping is the natural and most appropriated tool to perform this analysis [4,9,10]. As mentioned in the literature [10] with the expansion of the publishing market we have today a relative variety of textbooks produced within this epistemosphere. This created the possibility and the need to produce new proposals for education.…”

“…One part of the theory deals with the socio-cultural influences on didactic teaching [7,21]. And the other is concerned with the epistemological and semantic aspects of the theories and how these are translated to the textbooks [4,9,10].…”