Indeed, the convergence of these four fields, in their effort to understand how concepts change in content and organization, has led to the emergence of an interdisciplinary sub-field in its own right.
[7][8] It became clear that students were assimilating the scientific ideas presented to them in the classroom into their existing concepts, resulting in what came to be referred to as "misconceptions".
Researchers in science education turned to the task of identifying these pre-instruction ideas and sought instructional strategies that would succeed in helping student transform their intuitive concepts into more scientific alternatives.
That is, the idea of a "paradigm" understood as an integrative set of theoretical concepts and methods taken for granted by a particular research community.
A number of perspectives on conceptual change have emerged, and proponents have been engaging in a lively debate since the early 1980s.
[6][11][12][13][14][15][16] The concepts of the adult or child or learner are seen as themselves embedded within intuitive theories that require substantial restructuring if they are to resemble those of the scientist.
A closely related perspective to this theory change view makes a particular claim about the differences between naïve and scientific concepts.
This "framework theory" view[21][22][23][24] suggests that when new ideas are encountered, basic ontological commitments influence how they are ignored, resisted, or assimilated.
These are sub-conceptual in that they are of a smaller "grain size" than meanings associated with words and often can be seen to originate from abstractions from sensorimotor schemas.
The reorganization is seen as involving the gradual increase in the degree of coherence and consistency in the application of knowledge systems composed of a heterogeneous collection of resources.
[30][31][32][33][34] Despite the various points of disagreement, there has been a great deal of consensus around the idea that successful conceptual change often requires meta-conceptual awareness and sophistication on the part of the learner.
However, some of the intuitive conceptions people hold cannot be changed because they are pervasive, persistent, and helpful in some contexts such as everyday life.
[37] Instructional approaches based on metacognition and self-regulated learning have been found to be effective in this regard and in enhancing students’ conceptual understanding.
Thus, the drive to make sense of anomalous observations that are inconsistent with existing concepts and the various model-based reasoning processes have been proposed as sources of conceptual change in individuals and learners.
[53] While much of conceptual research has been geared to scientific concepts, recent work is increasingly emerging in other domains.