Non-linear dynamic modeling of microdevelopmental processes of students' conceptual change in science

This chapter reports a study using non-linear dynamic and microdeveopmental approaches to modeling students' conceptual change in science. Cognitive processes of children's conceptual change in learning a scientific concept, i.e. magnetism, were intensively observed at an interval of minutes, and a mathematical model was then applied to fit the observed patterns. Based on the comparison between the three simulated trajectories and the three empirical trajectories, we identified a dynamic reciprocal interaction between the student's actual developmental level and the instructor-guided potential developmental level responsible for different microdevelopmental trajectories. It was also found that the dynamic interaction between the rate of cognitive growth and the difficulty of learning content explained the variability of individual students' learning trajectories. The research findings suggest that cognitive processes of conceptual change in science are a self-organizing system in which various trajectories of learning emerge through the interactions between student parameters (e.g., prior knowledge and rate of learning) and teacher parameters (e.g., instructional goals and pace of teaching).