The Case for Dynamic Models of Learners' Ontologies in Physics

By Ayush Gupta, David M. Hammer, Edward F. Redish. 2008

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a series of well-known papers, Chi and Slotta (M. T. H. Chi, 1992, 2005; M. T. H. Chi & J. D. Slotta, 1993; M. T. H. Chi, J. D. Slotta, & N. de Leeuw, 1994; J. Slotta & M. T. H. Chi, 2006; J. D. Slotta, M. T. H. Chi, & E. Joram, 1995) have contended that a reason for students' difficulties in learning physics is that students think about concepts as things rather than as processes and that there is a significant barrier between these 2 ontological categories. We contest this view, arguing that expert and novice reasoning often and productively traverses ontological categories. We cite examples from everyday, classroom, and professional contexts to illustrate this. We agree with Chi and Slotta that instruction should attend to learners' ontologies, but we find that these ontologies are better understood as dynamic and context dependent rather than as static constraints. To promote 1 ontological description in physics instruction, as suggested by Slotta and Chi, could undermine novices' access to productive cognitive resources that they bring to their studies and inhibit their transition to the dynamic ontological flexibility required of experts.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/daada085122b7f9a63366cd37165776371005161

Citations in the corpus

• Misconceived Causal Explanations for Emergent Processes (2012, unknown): “We are not referring to dependence or independence of any interaction upon some prior interactions occurring before this moment in time, which can be true, as Gupta, Hammer, and Redish (2010) have pointed out.”
• Synthesis of Discipline-Based Education Research in Physics. (2014, unknown): “Recently, this view has been challenged [21].”