The act of remembering is vital to learning. For a chemist to understand or explain a phenomenon, we use specific vocabulary that has nuanced meaning depending on the context. Vocabulary holds great power in communicating what you are thinking and within a science discipline it could be the difference between a correct and incorrect explanation (e.g., heat and temperature are different variables). Explanations crafted by young chemists who have yet to distinguish between the two variables would suffer a lack of specificity. However, this does not mean they absolutely, without a doubt, do not understand the question. Their mental cognitive resources (epistemic and conceptual) may have never activated. This is an important distinction within assessment, but I will make the assumption that all the questions we ask will activate those cognitive resources if students have them. This is for my own posterity within my argument and is not advisable.
What determines where or not students have any particular cognitive resource? There are different theoretical perspectives which seek to answer this question, the misconceptions theory and the resources theory of conceptual change are prominent in my field. These two theories are often pitted against each other, which is strange, because they both describe the same human phenomenon, learning. How are these theories similar?
The misconceptions perspective introduced an idea of cognitive conflict and posits the goal of instruction as challenging students’ pre-conceptions to remove them or alter them in line with disciplinary expectations. The challenge of students’ misconception is the mechanism for learning. I see this in class. We use a multiple-choice voting system in our large lecture halls to engage students, and force students to take a stance, to decide on an answer that represents their current conception. The instructor almost always revies the answer to our students, providing them with the correct information. This question-answer dance is how students learn what to put on their exams.
Most importantly in this process is the time in between asking students a particular question and when the instructor shows the answer. This time acts as a chance for students to turn on their own previous conceptions and solidify them, to take a stance on what they think they know. The subsequent answer provides the ultimate test of their knowledge. Students then must accept or reject the disciplinary expectation changing their conceptions (adding, removing, or altering pre-existing conceptions). If students get the answer correctly, this solidifies their current understanding. If students are so confused or lost, then the answer from the instructor may hold little to no meaning, they may not be able to alter their conceptions in light of new information if they do not understand that information. In order for students to understand any particular question, they must remember what the terms in the question mean, what prior questions we have asked that look similar to the current question, and what information is important for answering the question. If students do not remember key terms or phrases, they will be lost. I often ask students, when they ask me about the clicker question, previous questions that have already been covered to reveal. Their answers reveal to me what they know and what they don’t know, to a certain degree. This informs my next question, and the question after that. Through a quick conversation, I hope to extract information from a student.
Is this the best mechanism for learning? Does this result in deep understanding that can be applied in unfamiliar questions or contexts. If students do not understand the questions, failing to remember all concepts necessary to answer the question, then how could they possibly learn? They don’t, they sit there in their confusion, hoping no one calls them out for not knowing. They fear being labeled as stupid. If students simply do not remember how, how is that stupid?
The resources perspective thinks of student cognition as context depend. Student memory is context depended on what is being asked of them. These concepts are intrinsically tied to the other concepts discussed in class or from personal experience. A misconceptions perspective views those personal memories (which students draw upon for their conception of how the world works) as stagnant and must be challenged wholesale. The resources conception moves away from ‘thing-ing’ knowledge. This theory asks researchers to think about student cognition on a smaller timescale. These resources appear or do not appear and the activation depends on context. When we ask students clicker questions, they draw upon long term memories to combine them with the stimulus the observe within their working memory. What determines the cognitive units that arise from long-term memory? Context clues.
In this context, the people in positions of power determine the disciplinary expectations. This in turn affects what resources get activated from students’ long-term memory and what they notice in the environment.
JLS