Teaching for Conceptual Change: Confronting Children's Experience

The authors of this article state that is very difficult for children to change their thinking in understanding scientific concepts even in the face of different evidence that challenges their thinking. Children simply trust their lifelong convictions since they have limited experience with scientific methods. Children in the middle elementary grades are beginning to use concrete operations. When confronted with new evidence children in these grades tend to revert to previous developmental stage thinking. Children in concrete operations perceive and interpret the world through their feelings rather than reasoning and logic. They usually modify  their experiments to  accommodate their beliefs rather than change their beliefs to fit the  evidence.
That is why children in  Mrs. O'Brien classroom cannot believe and accept the evidence of their experiment, namely that the temperature of the sweaters, hats and rugs, which they always associated in their lifelong experience  with heat, did not raise when they measured it.
Authors suggest several barriers to conceptual change in children.  One of them is stubbornness as children refuse to admit errors in their thinking. Teachers should be very cautious with new terminology as it may be difficult for children to master these new scientific terms  in addition to a new way of thinking.
The other obstacles to conceptual change is children's own perception. They believe more to what they see and hear, which in science does not always work.
In order to achieve conceptual change in children's thinking about scientific concepts teachers should stress relevance to children's everyday life outside of school when explaining scientific phenomena. They should allow children to make predictions when conducting experiments and encourage children to be consistent in their thinking when facing new patterns of thought.
This strategy this teacher applied in the classroom really helped me understand better what is means to confront children's preconceptions and use the probes to support science learning in the classroom.