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Bodily engagement with the material and sociocultural world is ubiquitous in doing and learning science. However, science education researchers have often tended to emphasize the disembodied and nonmaterial aspects of science learning, thereby overlooking the crucial role of the body in meaning-making processes. While in recent years we have seen a turn towards embracing embodied perspectives, there persist considerable theoretical and methodological differences within research on embodiment in science education that hamper productive discourse. What is needed is a careful examination of how different traditions and disciplines, among them philosophy, social semiotics, and cognitive science, bear on embodiment in science education research. This paper aims to explore and articulate the differences and convergences of embodied perspectives in science education research in the form of a dialogue between three fictitious personas that stand for the cognitive, social-interactionist, and phenomenological research traditions. By bringing these traditions into dialogue, we aim to better position the role of the body in the science education research landscape. In doing so, we take essential steps towards unifying terminology across different research traditions and further exploring the implications of embodiment for science education research.

Science education in the Arab world is conducted in various multilingual contexts. When science is taught in Arabic, diglossia – the coexistence of the formal language of literacy alongside a local...

There has been some research on science concept learning that has explored the neural underpinnings of conceptual representations and conceptual change processes. However, this work has not engaged with findings from the learning sciences suggesting that intuitive knowledge - such as that based on sensorimotor experience - is put to use in various aspects of scientific understanding and reasoning. This chapter suggests that the construct of image schema can serve as a theoretical linchpin linking research in the learning sciences and cognitive neuroscience. It is argued that recognizing this can lead to a productive line of research in the educational neuroscience of science concept learning.

A substantial body of research has accumulated on the use of metaphor and analogy in science, their role in the construction of novel concepts during learning, and their strategic deployment in instruction. Despite this significant body of work, we still do not have a coherent picture of the role of metaphor in how a specific scientific concept comes to be understood. This chapter draws on the theories of conceptual metaphor and blending to put forward a perspective on how metaphor makes a scientific concept accessible; crucially, the account coordinates analyses of the roles of metaphor in science, learning and instruction. The chapter offers a case study of the concept of energy to illustrate the perspective.

Many of the goals of research on conceptual metaphor in science education overlap with the goals of research on conceptual change. The relevance of a conceptual metaphor perspective to the study of conceptual change has already been discussed. However, a substantial body of literature on conceptual metaphor in science education has now emerged. This work has not yet been synthesized or related explicitly to the goals of conceptual change research. This paper first presents a broad sketch of the study of conceptual change, characterizing the goals of this body of work, its contributions to date, and identifying open questions. Next, the literature on conceptual metaphor in science education is reviewed against this background. The review clarifies the natural theoretical connections between the conceptual metaphor perspective and the phenomenon of conceptual change. It then examines the contributions made by the literature on conceptual metaphor in science education to the goals of research on conceptual c...

The philosophical concerns have to do with the extent to which scientific theories can be said to be representations of the world and what constitutes adequate justification of the acceptance or rejection of a proposed theory. Some philosophers insisted that the justification of a theory rests on being able to construct a “rational” logical argument that establishes consistency between a proposed theory and available data. The appeal to cognitive psychology provides particular solutions to problems identified with other accounts of scientific theories. The growing interest in a naturalized philosophy of science following Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions led to an emerging interest in cognitive science as a repository of ideas for understanding scientific knowledge representation and reasoning. Giere examines scientific cognition in light of developments in cognitive science suggesting that performance on many advanced cognitive tasks involve distributed cognitive processes.

A growing body of research has examined the experiential grounding of scientific thought and the role of experiential intuitive knowledge in science learning. Meanwhile, research in cognitive linguistics has identified many conceptual metaphors (CMs), metaphorical mappings between abstract concepts and experiential source domains, implicit in everyday and scientific language. However, the contributions of CMs to scientific understanding and reasoning are still not clear. This study explores the roles that CMs play in scientific problem-solving through a detailed analysis of two physical chemistry PhD students solving problems on entropy. We report evidence in support of three claims: a range of CMs are used in problem-solving enabling flexible, experiential construals of abstract scientific concepts; CMs are coordinated with one another and other resources supporting the alignment of qualitative and quantitative reasoning; use of CMs grounds abstract reasoning in a “narrative” discourse incorporating conc...

Various features of scientific discourse have been characterized in the science education literature, and challenges students face in appropriating these features have been explored. Using the fram ...

This paper argues that the metaphorical representation of concepts and the appropriation of language-based construals can be hypothesized as additional sources of conceptual change alongside those previously proposed. Analyses of construals implicit in the lay and scientific use of the noun energy from the perspective of the theory of conceptual metaphor are summarized. The experientially grounded metaphorical construals identified in both uses help conceptualize the shift from the concrete, naïve to the abstract, scientific understanding of energy. The case of the concept of energy motivates the more general hypothesis that an important part of learning a highly abstract (even mathematical) concept is the appropriation of experientially grounded metaphorical construals implicit in scientific discourse. Pedagogical implications of this proposal are discussed.

Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterising differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem-solving. A more recent line of research has focused on characterising continuity between experts and novices at the level of non-propositional knowledge structures and processes such as image-schemas, imagistic simulation and analogical reasoning. This study contributes to an emerging literature addressing the coordination of both propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures and processes in the development of expertise. Specifically, in this paper, we compare problem-solving across two levels of expertise — undergraduate students of chemistry and Ph.D. students in physical chemistry — identifying differences in how conceptual metaphors (CMs) are used (or not) to coordinate propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures in the context of solving problems on entropy. It is hypothesised that the acquisition of expertise involves learning to coordinate the use of CMs to interpret propositional (linguistic and mathematical) knowledge and apply it to specific problem situations. Moreover, we suggest that with increasing expertise, the use of CMs involves a greater degree of subjective engagement with physical entities and processes. Implications for research on learning and instructional practice are discussed.

We introduce here a special issue of this journal on the theme of ‘Conceptual Metaphor and Embodied Cognition in Science Learning'. The idea for this issue grew out of a symposium that we organized...

An account of conceptual change within the domain of thermal physics is described. In particular, the difficulties of inducing an ontological change in students' concept of heat is examined. While the overall goal of this research is to document microgenetically the process of conceptual change that takes place as students learn thermal physics, this paper describes the specific role of metaconceptual teaching. It is argued that metaconceptual teaching that addresses the fact that students and scientists may use the same terms for different conceptual referents and that scientific conceptions can account for everyday ones, helps to effect the targeted ontological changes. The pedagogical success of integrating the scientific and the everyday view is consistent with young adolescents' difficulties with a relativistic epistemology in which scientific and everyday views are presented as valid alternatives.

Science learning has been characterized as the construction of conceptual structures, as the appreciation of the nature of scientific knowledge, and as participation in scientific practices. Research has primarily been carried out in each of these domains separately. There is a growing body of research that addresses the interaction between these components. In this paper we seek to add to this literature by integrating our ideas with that of other researchers to begin an initial formulation of a multifaceted framework for studying physics learning using computer-based conceptual models. In this framework we distinguish two aspects of conceptual restructuring: understanding computer models and internalizing these models as a way to construe the physical world. We argue that two different types of interaction (symmetric and asymmetric) support these different kinds of restructuring. We conclude that achieving deep changes in conceptualization requires consideration of conceptualization as a component of practice.