The Connection Between Research and Practice

Kennedy, Mary M.

doi:10.3102/0013189x026007004

Cited by 233 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Mainstream research in the domain of conceptual change, however, is substantially different from the basic research Kennedy (1997) attacked. Constructivist research on conceptual change in science education, for instance, has been of an applied research type from the very start in the early 1980s.…”

Section: Impact Of Research In School Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

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Conceptual change: A powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning

Duit

Treagust

2003

International Journal of Science Education

930

494

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IntroductionIn this review, we discuss (1) how the notion of conceptual change has developed over the past three decades, (2) giving rise to alternative approaches for analysing conceptual change, (3) leading towards a multi-perspective view of science learning and instruction that (4) can be used to examine scientific literacy and (5) lead to a powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning. Development of the notion of conceptual change Historical developmentsResearch on students' and teachers' conceptions and their roles in teaching and learning science has become one of the most important domains of science education research on teaching and learning during the past three decades. Starting in the 1970s with the investigation of students' pre-instructional conceptions on various science content domains such as the electric circuit, force, energy, combustion, and evolution, the analysis of students' understanding across most science domains has been comprehensively documented in the bibliography by Duit (2002). Two decades ago, research by Gilbert, Osborne and Fensham (1982) showed that children are not passive learners and the way they make sense of their experiences led to this intuitive knowledge being called "children's science" (p. 623). Findings from many studies over the past three decades show that students do not come into science instruction without any pre-instructional knowledge or beliefs about the phenomena and concepts to be taught. Rather, students already hold deeply rooted conceptions and ideas that are not in harmony with the science views or are even in stark contrast to them. It is noteworthy that there are still a remarkable number of studies on students' learning in science that primarily investigate such students' conceptions on the content level. Since the middle of the 1980s investigations of students' conceptions at meta-levels, namely conceptions of the nature of science and views of learning (i.e., meta-cognitive conceptions) also have been given considerable attention. Research shows that students' conceptions here are also rather limited and naive.The 1980s saw the growth of studies investigating the development of students' pre-instructional conceptions towards the intended science concepts in conceptual change approaches. Research on students' conceptions and conceptual change has been embedded in various theoretical frames over the past decades. Initially, Piagetian ideas were applied that drew primarily on stage theory on the one hand and his clinical interview on the other. Also basic frameworks of the emerging theories of cognitive psychology were adopted.Later analogous to that of mindfulness (Salomon & Globerson, 1987, p. 623), a "construct which reflects a voluntary state of mind, and connects among motivation, cognition and learning." The concept of conceptual changeResearch on the concept of conceptual change has developed a unique vocabulary because conceptual change can happen at a number of levels and different authors use alternative terms to descri...

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Section: Impact Of Research In School Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kennedy (1997), for instance, argued that the "awful reputation of educational research" (Kaestle, 1993) is due to the domination of basic research by cognitive psychology. Such studies are usually carried out in laboratory settings in order to allow strict control of variables.…”

Section: Impact Of Research In School Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual change: A powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning

Duit

Treagust

2003

International Journal of Science Education

930

494

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“…It became clear from these discussions that there appears to be a gap between educational practice and the theory of constructivism and that the different theoretical positions of constructivism, all with varying emphasis, have made it difficult to narrow the bridge between theory and practice (De Corte 2000;Kennedy 1997). This gap poses one of the challenges to the constructivist reaction to traditional teaching (Harris and Alexander 1998).…”

Section: Research On the Effects Of Constructivist Learning Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the effects of constructivist learning environments: introducing a multi-directional approach

2008

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“…An important prerequisite for the successful implementation of educational research results is that the outcomes should be recognizable for teachers and respond to their concerns (Kennedy 1997;National Research Council 2002). In the Netherlands Witte developed a research method which resulted in six reliably defined levels of literary competence (Witte, 2008;Witte et al, 2012).…”

Section: Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Europe open to a student-oriented framework for literature? A comparative analysis of the formal literature curriculum in six European countries.

Witte¹,

Sâmihaian

2013

L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature

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This study is a comparative analysis of literary curricula in six European countries and is part of the LiFT-2 project, funded by the Comenius Life Long Learning Programme of the European Commission. The result of this project was a European literary framework for secondary education which can be described as a developmental competence-based taxonomy for teachers (www.literaryframework.eu). In this article we chart the paradigmatic tendencies of the literature teaching curricula between grades 7 and 12 of five countries (Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Romania) and three German states (Bavaria, Lower Saxony, Thuringia). The aim of this study was to discover the degree to which these tendencies corresponded to the developmental European Literary Framework we have conceived on the basis of the shared pedagogical content knowledge of teachers and experts in six countries. The conclusion is that most of the analysed literary curricula are open to a developmental competence-based framework, but additional research is needed to determine whether Europe as a whole is ready for such a framework.

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The Connection Between Research and Practice

Cited by 233 publications

References 32 publications

Conceptual change: A powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning

Conceptual change: A powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning

Understanding the effects of constructivist learning environments: introducing a multi-directional approach

Is Europe open to a student-oriented framework for literature? A comparative analysis of the formal literature curriculum in six European countries.

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