DOMAIN GENERAL RESOURCES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A THEORY OF

Determining the initial state of an infant’s mind has long been the focus of research in developmental psychology and many challenges, specifically with regards to conceptual change, have been identified. One such challenge is to describe the processes and learning mechanisms involved in the acquisition and subsequent change of naïve concepts, or intuitive theories. Intuitive theories (as discussed in Section 2.3.2) are unique to specific domains and provide explanatory and predictive reasoning that allows children to make meaning of their observations and interactions with their environment. They establish frameworks for conceptual development. These framework theories constrain conceptual development. As shown in Section 2.4.2 the framework theories (or synthetic mental models) such as the earth being flat or the antagonistic movement of the sun and moon during the day/night cycle will constrain the development of other normative concepts such as gravity, the hemispheres of the earth, and seasonal changes.

With regard to this issue, I have argued that teachers should identify these domain specific intuitive theories that learners hold before designing lessons. Domain specific learning mechanisms can alter intuitive theories and drive conceptual development. Such mechanisms, however, are supported by a range of domain

general cognitive resources. The domain general cognitive resources that hold value

for conceptual change are executive functions (EF) which are cognitive processes that are involved in all cognitive work that demands novel and innovative thinking as well

as non-automatic operations (Diamond 2013). EF’s bring about cognitive actions such as planning, self-control, sustained attention and cognitive control. Thus, a young learner may have a sturdy domain specific intuitive theory that is not easily swayed, unless teachers have some idea of what else is involved in a child’s cognitive activity – such as EFs.

Three core processes of EF have been identified: Working memory which comprise the processes responsible for sorting and updating information; inhibition which refer to processes responsible for constraining the activation of competing responses or conflicting representations; and set-shifting which are processes responsible for the flexibility to select from a multitude of relevant sources of information. Other processes, such as reasoning, deliberate and conscious planning and problem solving are thought to be combinations of the three core EF processes. Zaitchik et al. (2016) explains that EF plays a role in the academic success of children and posits that EF can be a greater indicator of school readiness than other factors, such as reading skills, maths skills or IQ. They explain this finding by proposing that children with better developed EF pay more attention at home and in school, which allows them to process more information than their peers, who have less developed EF. It is also possible that children with better developed EF are able to express what they know better than the other children. Well-developed EF are regarded as the driver of self-regulation in learning.

EF competence can be used to predict the conceptual reasoning performance of children (Pagani, Fitzpatrick & Barnett 2013). EF are regarded as one of the essential components that allow for conceptual change, given that the mechanisms of conceptual change, such as ‘bootstrapping’ (see Section 2.3.3); the generation and evaluation of hypotheses; construction of mental models; and flexibly shifting between theories as a result of changing context, rely on processes such as working memory, inhibition and set-shifting. If we are to address the challenges that children face when learning, it is important that teachers have a nuanced understanding of not only the domain specific learning mechanisms, but also of the influence that EF would have on the ability of children to change existing theories. I argue that teachers who have this nuanced understanding of the interrelationship between domain general cognitive resources and domain specific learning mechanisms would be able to design learning opportunities that may hold more promise for conceptual change.

In science education, and of interest to this study, Zaitchik et al. (2014) conducted a series of tests to determine whether EF could predict a child’s theorising of vitalist biology. The participants in these studies were asked to complete a battery of tests that attempted to identify their acquisition of a theory of vitalist biology as well as a battery of tests that attempted to describe the state of the participants’ EF’s development. It was found that the participants’ score on the EF battery of tests significantly predicted their performance in the vitalist biology tests. Zaitchik et al. (2014) posit that children with higher EF scores will be able to advance more rapidly in constructing a theory of vitalist biology, given that EF supports theory-building learning mechanisms (in general). To further investigate the possibility that EFs support domain specific learning mechanisms, Bascandziev et al. (2015) conducted an intervention study that showed that individual differences in EF predicted children’s benefit from theory-relevant (specific domain) training, such as for understanding of the characteristics of ‘living objects’. In this study the authors conducted an intervention study that tested children, using the biology battery of tests (see Chapter 3) as well as a set of control questions on ‘fun facts’ in the subject of biology.

During the intervention the children were instructed on vitalism, using a curriculum designed to focus on basic anatomy and physiology of organ systems and how these systems function cooperatively to support and facilitate movement, health and growth. During the post-tests the participants completed the same set of biology and fun fact tests that were administered during the pre-test. In a subsequent post- test the participants completed EF and semantic fluency tasks as well as a receptive vocabulary test. The researchers found that the individual differences in EF predict the benefit the participants would gain from training that is relevant to the specific theory, in this case a theory of vitalist biology. The majority of participants showed improvement, some to a lesser degree, while some participants improved substantially.

From this study the authors argue that EF plays an important role in conceptual change and attribute the improvement in the participants’ biology test scores to their ability to pay better attention during the training sessions. This is a case that exhibits the benefits of curriculum design that values the specific instruction of one of biology’s ‘big ideas’ and shows that the mere accretion of facts do not lead to conceptual change. The South African foundation phase curriculum does not explicitly include the teaching of a theory of vitalist biology, just as it doesn’t include the explicit teaching of

a theory of physics and I argue for the inclusion of these theories in not only the school curriculum but also in the curriculum of teacher training programmes.

Other studies have attempted to determine what the role of EF is in the expression of an individual’s theory of vitalist biology. Carey et al. (2015) hypothesise that EF are employed in the recall of vitalist information in that mature ‘vitalists’ would be required to inhibit their intuitive responses to a set of questions on animism and, thus, have a delayed response to these questions. Thomson-Shill et al. (2009) found that college students make the same errors under speeded conditions as their elementary school counterparts under non-speeded conditions. These errors include the attribution of life to inanimate objects and denied life to plants. It was also found that professors of biology show a delayed response to questions that require them to attribute life to plants compared to their response time to attribute life to a dog. This shows that intuitive theories remain in cognitive structures throughout our lifetime and require EF to inhibit the expression of these naïve theories in favour of the normative theory.

Zaitchik and Solomon (2008) found that the ‘health’ of an individual’s EF also has an influence on the expression of vitalist biology. In a study that researched the understanding of vitalist biology of patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, they found that impaired EF leads to a worse performance on the battery of vitalist biology tests. The same was found when comparing the performance of elderly subjects to young adults, showing that the degradation of EF leads to the inability to express a theory of vitalist biology adequately (Tardiff et al. 2015). From these studies it is evident that instruction, based solely on the subject content (such as fun facts of biology), without considering the influence of not only domain specific learning mechanisms, but also the associated domain general resources, such as EF, that support these mechanisms, could prove fruitless. On this view, I argue for the inclusion of EF along with domain specific learning mechanisms, and how these domains interact, in science teacher education training programmes.

Except for these domain general resources, language also contributes vastly to the development of concepts. It manifests at the intersect of general- and specific domains of cognition.

2.6 A LINGUISTIC ‘GAZE’ ON CONCEPTUAL CHANGE AND CONCEPTUAL