Posner, Strike, Hewson & Gertzog (1982) Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change
This article examines how individuals undergo a change in their conceptual understanding. They start with the premise that we have a conceptual ecology. Meaning, we have a network of concepts in our head. All of these concepts are interrelated so they are all tied together the same way different parts of an ecology are all tied together. Development in this conceptual ecology (i.e., learning) occurs as the result of 2 processes: assimilation and accommodation (these 2 processes come from Piaget’s work, by the way).
Assimilation: This occurs when you fit some new information into an existing structure or conceptual understanding. For example, a child may have the concept that short furry things with 4 legs are dogs. Hence, when the child sees a new short furry thing with 4 legs, the child assimilates this new information into the "dog" concept. In assimilation, new information is added to the conceptual ecology, but no fundamental changes are made in the conceptual ecology – the concepts and their relations are not altered in any significant way.
Accommodation: This occurs new information cannot easily be fit into an existing structure or conceptual understanding. Instead, the new information requires a transformation and reorganization of the conceptual ecology. For example, the child with the "dog" concept sees a cat walk by and says, "Doggy!" But mom corrects the child and says, "No, that’s a cat." Now the child has to reformulate the "dog" concept and create a new "cat" concept. This is more fundamental change of the conceptual ecology and it is what the authors refer to as "conceptual change."
The authors are primarily interested in the process of accommodation, because accommodation represents a more fundamental advance in learning. However, there is a problem with accommodation – it doesn’t always happen when it should. We often fail to make accommodations in our conceptual ecology and instead force new information into our existing concepts. This is the problem that the authors want to address. They want to try to explain why we often fail to make accommodations and to identify the conditions necessary for accommodation (i.e. conceptual change) to occur.
The authors approach this problem by looking at the history of science. They use conceptual advances and change in the field of science as an analogy for conceptual change in an individual. Hence they try to identify the conditions needed to bring about a major conceptual change or paradigm shift in a scientific field. Then by analogy, they reason that these same conditions are needed for conceptual change to occur in individuals. So what are the conditions? They identify four:
The authors then report data from student interviews to support the claim that these conditions are needed for conceptual change to occur in individuals as well as scientific communities. Finally, they discuss some of the educational implications.
Discussion Questions