Longitudinal Study of Primary School Children's Learning - Science Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Abstract
Current studies by cognitive scientists of variables influencing cognition suggest that current prevailing conceptual theories regarding scientific learning need to be reconsidered. Rather than learners' cognitive constructions, these new perspectives highlight the importance of context, embodied practices, and narrative-based representation.
In this research, authors use data from a longitudinal study of primary school children's learning in order to develop a framework based on these contemporary accounts and to distinguish important areas of difference between conceptual change and change perspectives.
According to the findings, this framework gives significant theoretical and practical insights into how children learn and the vital role of representational engagement in this learning. The authors claim that the nature and method of conceptual change may be re-interpreted in terms of the development of students' representational resources.

Answers to the Guide Questions
1. What are the recent evidences of cognitive science related to learning and conceptual change?
The challenges of scientific literacy: From the viewpoint of second-generation cognitive science.As noted by Klein (2006, p. 151), cognitive scientists such as Barsalou (1999, 2003), Clark (1997), and Lakoff and Johnson (1999), view thinking, especially by learners, as perceptual processing and analogical mapping, where concepts and linguistic meanings are "perceptually based, fuzzy and contextual."
In reviewing recent accounts of cognition, Klein (2006) claimed that they form a coherent set, and represent a shift from earlier perspectives.
Following Lakoff and Johnson (1999), he characterized this work as "second-generation" cognitive science.
Klein claimed that first-generation cognitive scientists viewed thinking as primarily the logical manipulation of clearly defined symbols, where science explanations are deduced from causal laws applied to particular conditions and events.
From this perspective, knowledge is understood as stored, stable mental constructs.
Language, or any other kind of representation, is understood as denoting propositional understandings, and therefore functions as a "by-product of thought" (Klein, 2006, p. 149).
From this viewpoint, students change their concepts through teacher-guided recognition of the inadequacy of their prior, naive explanations, and shift commitment to more logically compelling scientific accounts.
Klein's labelling of "second-generation" perspectives is perhaps provocative in at least two respects.
First, while Klein (2006, p. 155) did not claim that second-generational perspectives simply replace mistaken earlier theories, his language implies that earlier perspectives are in some way unitary and, as a set, outmoded.
Second, it is difficult to definitively assign researchers to just one camp, given the complexity of views they express.
In reviewing the current state of conceptual change theory, Vosniadou (2008b) noted that there was ongoing debate about the nature of what it is that changes, and extensive elaboration of possible mechanisms that enable conceptual change processes.
The structural entities which comprise the theoretical explanatory elements for considering conceptual change are variously held to be concepts or concepts within theories (Carey, 1985, 1999), theories or mental models (Vosniadou, 1994), or ontologies (Chi, Slotta, & De Leeuw, 1994).
The many mechanisms explored for supporting conceptual change include mental models and model-based reasoning (Clement, 2000; Gilbert & Boulter, 2000; Harrison & Treagust, 2000; Justi & Gilbert, 2003), reasoning through analogies (Harrison & Treagust, 1993), and cognitive conflict.
Advocates of model-based reasoning have claimed that the process of constructing, critiquing, and revising external modelling representations can promote conceptual change.
Researchers within a conceptual change orientation have also focused on affective and motivational factors that enhance conceptual change processes (Sinatra, 2005).
By contrast, Jakobson and Wickman (2008), in analyzing interactions in an elementary school science classroom, show how conceptual learning is inextricably linked with aesthetic judgement in the way teachers and students approach tasks.
However, despite increasing acknowledgement of the possible role of representations in facilitating learning (e.g. Vosniadou, 2008b), conceptual change researchers continue to give primacy to mental models as the key driver of learning.
Students are expected to acquire skills in sustained inferential reasoning and abstract manipulation of formal symbols, and to understand what counts as "adequate specifications of how concepts are connected to their referents."
From this perspective, it might seem as though contemporary cognitive scientists have simply identified, or given new prominence to, the "naïve" cognitive processes learners use in their everyday world.
However, Reif and Larkin (1991) also noted that learning in science is achieved by both formal and non-formal methods.
By formal methods they referred to the use of symbolic representations such as formulas, algebra, and vector analysis guided by rule-based reasoning.
By non-formal methods they referred to approaches that "exploit human perceptual processes and qualitative reasoning capabilities" (p. 749).
They noted that effective learning in science required students to use both methods in "complementary ways" (p. 750), where non-formal methods can be "appropriately refined to ensure their consistency with more formal science knowledge."

2. Why the study utilized longitudinal design?
This paper uses longitudinal design to examine the learning framework's cognitive science ideas of primary school students. To make sense of the data, the study needed to adopt a more complex perspective on learning.
3. What are the major results and implications of the study?
The authors provide the findings of the study as a series of emergent themes in connection to the research questions.

Conceptual change approaches still struggle to theorize how to bridge student and scientist conceptions. The  analysis of recent cognitive science perspectives, emphasizing the building of students' representational resources, may provide such a theoretical perspective and a path forward for science teaching and learning.

INSIGHTS AND REFLECTIONS
Considering the authors studied the children for seven years, this study looked challenging to me as I read it. There appear to be numerous influences on a child's ability to learn. However, according to the authors, as the children's knowledge grew, so did their thinking. I considered it and questioned myself how the learners learned. Susan Ambrose and four colleagues outlined seven principles in their 2010 article How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Effective Teaching. These include the following:
1. Students' prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.
2. How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.
3. Students' motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.
4. Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances quality of students' learning.
5. To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply them.
6. Students' current level of development interacts with the social, emotional and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.
7. To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.

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