Characterizing and Measuring Student Explanations of Chemical
Equilibrium
Research on conceptual change,
with the goal of characterizing the development of conceptual understanding,
suffers from several extant theoretical and methodological challenges. There
is little agreement over the central issues in the field, including what it
means to “have a concept” or what the processes are by which conceptual change
occurs. As a result, several competing theories co-exist in the literature,
often explicitly contradictory.
I believe this difficulty is due, in part, to two issues. First, researchers
lack explicit analytic means for unpacking the rich complexity and contextuality
of cognitive activity, including deceptively simple activities such as answering
a question during an interview or while taking a test. Consequently, researchers
face a persistent difficulty
when attempting to disentangle the contributions of conceptual systems from
the contributions of the social and interactional structures that likewise
organize and constrain cognitive activity.
Second, although the various types
of conceptual systems purported to be involved in conceptual change are distinguished
by several qualitative properties, such as scope, researchers lack accurate,
reliable, sample-independent, and theory-independent measures of these properties.
Consequently, it is difficult to use such properties to compare the adequacy
of different theories in explaining the same data, let alone data collected
from different groups or with different methods.
The objective of my dissertation
is to seek evidence for whether two fledgling theoretical and methodological
innovations can begin to address the above challenges in a study of conceptual
understanding. The project will focus on undergraduate student explanations
of chemical phenomena involving dynamic equilibrium. In the first stage of
the project, the nascent method of performance analysis will be used to characterize
both the informational and interactional properties of student explanations
given during a series of clinical interviews. Some of these qualitative properties
will then be developed into hierarchical, interval scales, collectively called
the Multidimensional Measure of Conceptual Complexity, for the purpose of
accurately and precisely measuring these properties using Rasch measurement
technology. The overarching goal is to see whether the application of these
two methods can produce meaningful, useful data that are sensitive to the
complexity and contextuality of cognitive activity, and that can support the
critical comparison of competing theories of conceptual change.
Who to Contact:
Nathaniel Brown