A Cartesian conception of material space views each part as external to every other part: "partes extra partes." Because two material things cannot occupy the same space, each of it exists in itself, separated by a boundary from everything else, including other things. This ontology is the origin of thinking the world in terms of…

Over the past two decades, science educators increasingly have become interested in the role of language in the learning of science and have drawn on the work of Bakhtin, among others, for understanding the dialogical nature of knowledge in a sociocultural framework. However, the nature of language and its relation to thinking have not…

"Experience" is one of the most used terms in (science) education, and it is recognized as being related to learning (education). Yet "what" experience is and "how" it is related to learning and change remains untheorized. In this paper, we mainly draw on the work of J. Dewey and L. S. Vygotsky but also on M. Bakhtin…

Lectures are often thought of in terms of information transfer: students (do not) "get" or "construct meaning of" what physics professors (lecturers) say and the notes they put on the chalkboard (overhead). But this information transfer view does not explain, for example, why students have a clear sense of understanding while they sit in a lecture…

Vygotsky's social-psychological theory of human development and Bakhtin/Vološinov's theory of language and the dialogical nature of thought have received increasing interest in the educational research literature but tend to remain unrelated even where co-citation occurs. In this article, I first present a model that integrates the fundamentally…

In and with this text, I introduce the Forum that centers around a series of essays written by a high school student and an interview with his teacher all collected as part of a larger study about students' discourses with respect to (nature of) science, learning, and knowing. I provide a brief review of the original findings, which had been…

Educators generally are concerned with testing what learners know by means of written tests, as if knowledge was some intrapsychological thing or state that could be translated and externalized into some interpsychologically available inscription that is a more-or-less accurate approximation of what the person knows. In such endeavors, language is…

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry-based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations…

In this study, we propose a set of concepts for conceptualizing issues of learning science related to globalization, the encounter with the (radically) foreign/strange--as this occurs as part of migration and even as part of the encounter of a learner with the unknown content that science lessons are to impart--from the perspective of the…

Most studies about students' conceptions and conceptual change are based exclusively on the analysis language, which is treated as a tool to make private contents of the mind public to researchers. Following recent studies that focused on (a) language and discursive practice and (b) the pragmatics of communication that draws on talk, gestures, and…

Examines the relationship of the amount of available short-term memory with the complexity of tasks the subjects mastered. Presents some hints for a better design of instruction. (YP)

Explores why students fail to learn from teacher demonstrations in a physics course. Reports that six dimensions may have prevented student learning, including lack of a theoretical framework to separate signals from noise, interference of discourses learned in other contexts, interference from other demonstrations and images, and problems in…

Investigates the relationship between students' views of the nature of scientific knowledge and their own learning of physics, and the evolution of this relationship over time. Uses two intensive case studies to illustrate students' views over time. Discusses the changes in students' views concerning the nature of scientific knowledge and the…

Learning physics is a complex phenomenon. In this article, we use concepts from the theory of nonlinear systems to study the development of language in classroom science in an experimental unit on chaos theory in a German 10th-grade physics classroom. In ongoing activity, the explanations students developed for phenomena emerged through…

Studied analogy generation and development and analogical reasoning with 25 German tenth graders in a physics class. Results show the advantages and disadvantages of using analogies in promoting conceptual change and as a teaching technique. (SLD)