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Teaching About Energy: Application of the Conceptual Profile Theory to Overcome the Encapsulation of School Science Knowledge

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Orlando Aguiar Jr at Federal University of Minas Gerais
Orlando Aguiar Jr
Hannah Sevian at Massachusetts Bay Community College
Hannah Sevian
Charbel El-Hani at Federal University of Bahia
Charbel El-Hani
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In this article, we draw upon the Conceptual Profile Theory to discuss the negotiation of meanings related to the energy concept in an 11th grade physics classroom. This theory is based on the heterogeneity of verbal thinking, that is, on the idea that any individual or society does not represent concepts in a single way. According to this perspective, the processes of conceptualization consist of the use of a repertoire of different socially stabilized signifiers, adjusted to the context in which they occur. We start by proposing zones of a conceptual profile model for energy, each zone being characterized by its own commitments and identifiable by certain modes of talking about energy. Based on classroom evidence, we claim that teachers and students negotiate meanings that interpenetrate the domains of everyday and scientific knowledge. Being inevitable and necessary, this heterogeneity of conceptual thinking needs to be considered in teaching design in order to allow its awareness on the part of the students. We argue that students’ conceptual development goals should be considered in terms of general goals of science education, which points to the need of overcoming the encapsulation of scientific school knowledge. We show that the Conceptual Profile Theory provides a basis for science education that can promote the crossing of cultural boundaries, seeking relations between science and the spheres of everyday life.
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ARTICLE
Teaching About Energy
Application of the Conceptual Profile Theory to Overcome the
Encapsulation of School Science Knowledge
Orlando Aguiar Jr
1
&Hannah Sevian
2
&Charbel N. El-Hani
3,4
Published online: 13 December 2018
#Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract
In this article, we draw upon the Conceptual Profile Theory to discuss the negotiation of
meanings related to the energy concept in an 11th grade physics classroom. This theory is
based on the heterogeneity of verbal thinking, that is, on the idea that any individual or society
does not represent concepts in a single way. According to this perspective, the processes of
conceptualization consist of the use of a repertoire of different socially stabilized signifiers,
adjusted to the context in which they occur. We start by proposing zones of a conceptual
profile model for energy, each zone being characterized by its own commitments and
identifiable by certain modes of talking about energy. Based on classroom evidence, we claim
that teachers and students negotiate meanings that interpenetrate the domains of everyday and
scientific knowledge. Being inevitable and necessary, this heterogeneity of conceptual thinking
needs to be considered in teaching design in order to allow its awareness on the part of the
students. We argue that students’conceptual development goals should be considered in terms
of general goals of science education, which points to the need of overcoming the encapsu-
lation of scientific school knowledge. We show that the Conceptual Profile Theory provides a
basis for science education that can promote the crossing of cultural boundaries, seeking
relations between science and the spheres of everyday life.
Science & Education (2018) 27:863–893
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-018-0010-z
*Orlando Aguiar, Jr
orlando@fae.ufmg.br
1
Faculty of Education, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
2
Department of Chemistry, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA
3
Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
4
National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in
Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE), Salvador, Brazil
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Consistent with research on conceptualizations of energy in science education (cf., Abramovitch & Fortus, 2023;Aguiar et al, 2018;Amin, 2009;Lancor, 2012), and broader claims regarding conceptual plurality as a feature of scientific concepts (cf., Kellert et al., 2006;, this analysis suggests that, instead of crafting a set of standards that present students with a "correct," unitary description of energy that will be useful across scientific disciplines, multiple incommensurate conceptualizations of energy are necessary for modeling and explaining phenomena in productive disciplinary ways. That is, while Hammer et al. (2012, p. 52) note that "understanding the concept of energy means, in part, understanding what kind of idea it is and what kind of intellectual pursuit it supports," energy is employed to support a variety of intellectual scientific pursuits; its conceptualization is entangled with the epistemic and conceptual frameworks of scientific disciplines. ...
... However, despite exhortations that energy is solely a quantitative property, "some number" assigned to a system without "too material a picture," energy is often treated metaphorically, represented in rich and complex ways. This is true not only for representations of energy in everyday language, but also in scientific contexts (Aguiar, et al., 2018;Amin, 2009). Such metaphorical construal of energy is not surprising: decades of research on conceptual metaphor has consistently found that concepts -particularly abstract concepts -are ultimately understood via metaphor (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980;Ochs, Gonzales, & Jacoby 1996) and that metaphorical representations can profoundly shape scientific concepts and inform and sustain further inquiry (Dunbar, 1997;Keller, 2015;Levy, 2020;Ortony, 1993;Otis 2000;Otis 2001). ...
... This is a commitment shared across these disciplines. Although many of the descriptions of energy in this article have been described as misconceptions or metaphorical construals of misconceptions (e.g., Doménech, 2007;Papadouris and Constantinou 2011;Watts 1983), that need not imply that the ideas are not useful for constructing normative disciplinary ideas about energy and reasoning productively with the construct (Aguiar, et al., 2018;Amin, 2009;Dreyfus, et al, 2014;Gupta et al. 2010). ...
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In the Next Generation Science Standards, energy is considered a “crosscutting concept” that bridges disciplinary boundaries and unites scientific disciplines. I examine how energy is represented in physics, biology, and chemistry contexts, using the reaction of molecular oxygen with sugar as an exemplar, and argue that disciplines disagree in how they represent the origin of energy that drives this process. In particular, while biology tends to locate energy as initially in the sugar molecule, chemistry locates the energy in molecular oxygen, and physics models energy as in the field between the molecules. That is to say, biology describes us as eating calories, chemistry as inhaling calories, and physics invents an abstract object (the field) as the container for energy. I then show how the conceptualizations made in each discipline stem from core disciplinary commitments, models, and concepts that structure what “counts” as an explanation. This conceptual plurality, then, is essential to disciplinary meaning. While such a pluralistic conceptualization appears to be contrary to scientific epistemology that prioritizes coherence and cognitive models that rely on unitary structures for transfer, I draw on recent research to argue that neither concern is fully founded. Finally, I suggest that building bridges between these contrasting conceptualizations may come later, in response to interdisciplinary questions and frameworks.
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... This means that different communities may use this concept differently for energy, giving it a spectrum of meanings ascribed to the concept in each community. Therefore, different energy attributes may be found in daily life, school science, or specific scientific disciplines [20,22]. ...
... This outcome fits the idea of conceptual profiles that was proposed by Mortimer [20]. Aguiar et al. [22] suggested a conceptual profile model for energy built with six zones. Each zone involves different ways of thinking and talking about energy, which can overlap in individuals' utterances, depending on the specific communication context. ...
... Their study concluded that the most obvious of the zones found in the classroom was the one they referred to as the "substantialist zone". According to this zone, energy is treated as a quasi-material substance, which is easily recognizable in the metaphors used that addressed energy as something that could be located in objects and used to do something [22]. This finding fits our findings on using energy as a resource by scientists, especially when discussing a biological phenomenon. ...
Conceptualization of Energy by Practicing Scientists: Do Researchers from Different Disciplines Grasp Energy as a Crosscutting Concept?
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Energy is one of the fundamental concepts of science in all disciplines. For this reason, it can serve as a concept that crosses disciplinary lines and serves as a bridge for students trying to describe a scientific phenomenon using different lenses. Underlying this vision, which is highlighted by the Framework for K-12 Science Education is the implicit assumption that the different disciplinary perspectives of energy have something in common, which should be the focus of instruction and supports the way scientists in the different disciplines use energy. However, does a “unified conception” of energy actually underlie the ways diverse scientists use energy in their fields? To answer this question, we conducted a small-scale interview study in which we interviewed 30 top-level interdisciplinary researchers and asked them to explain several phenomena from different disciplines; all phenomena could be explained in various ways, one of which was an energetic explanation. Our results suggest that researchers from different disciplines do not think of energy in the same way and do not think of energy as an interdisciplinary concept. We argue whether teaching energy in an interdisciplinary way may support the development of future scientists and lay citizens or an expectation that may add more difficulty to an already difficult task.
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... We were looking for the chain of support that led participants to acknowledge the CCC in their learning and/or teaching. With these | criteria, we identified very few articles that made the CCCs explicit to students (e.g., Aguiar et al., 2018;Barth-Cohen & Wittmann, 2017;Fick, 2018;Kohn et al., 2018a;Kohn et al., 2018b;Lamar et al., 2018;Leckie & Wall, 2017;Tripto et al., 2016). An example of an article that did make the CCCs explicit to students is Leckie and Wall (2017), who described how one teacher made the connections between CE explicit to students in their academic writing. ...
... Adding to the four empirical articles on SPQ, the one empirical article related to EM characterized how students' everyday descriptions are connected to scientific conceptions of energy. Aguiar et al. (2018) described how a teacher of 11th-grade physics and her students negotiated meaning about energy by blending the general domain of daily life and the school science domain. The authors called for considering the diversity of ways students speak and think about EM as well as their prior knowledge from previous courses. ...
... Through empirical analyses of instruction and student learning, five articles emphasized the need for explicit discussion of the CCC in relation to the DCI within a learning environment. In studying the interactions of a high school teacher and her students, Aguiar et al. (2018) found that the teacher needed to negotiate the meaning of energy. The teacher brought together the everyday and scientific knowledge about energy in order to support students to productively use their experiences in learning the big ideas in the physical sciences. ...
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New reforms in science education call for three‐dimensional learning by integrating disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts (CCCs). These reforms defined the new term, crosscutting concept (CCC), as a lens that has explanatory power across disciplines. To describe how researchers are examining and using the CCCs related to science teaching and learning, a literature review was conducted to identify articles that included the term “crosscutting concept” since its introduction in 2012. The articles were narrowed to those that use the term CCC as a component of the framing, analysis, findings, or discussion of their empirical or nonempirical article. A subset of the identified papers elaborated on the CCCs beyond existing policy documents and references. These papers were open‐coded to identify themes in how the CCCs were used. The identified themes suggest that the CCCs are useful for science teaching, learning, and research in terms of creating opportunities to learn, connecting to the big idea, linking to practice, drawing on funds of knowledge, and connecting across topics and disciplines. These themes were analyzed to identify areas of existing focus and those in need of additional research. This synthesis of the literature has implications for using and studying the CCCs within three‐dimensional teaching and learning.
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... Each zone represents a specific way of thinking about a given concept and emerges from the study of this concept in different genetic domains (sociocultural, ontogenetic and microgenetic) [12]. Each particular way of thinking is determined by ontological, epistemological and axiological commitments that one has about its meaning [16] and characterized by a specific way of speaking about the concept [14,17]. The main foundations of the conceptual profile framework are the following: (a) for a given concept heterogeneity in thinking is found in the population, (b) for a given concept heterogeneity in thinking is found in an individual, (c) as far as data analysis is concerned, modes of thinking and modes of speaking are considered as equivalent [12,14]. ...
... Then, in a metacognitive process, teachers help students become aware of distinct ways of thinking and the values or criteria that can guide the choice of perspectives to address specific problems [19]. Conceptual profiles have been developed for scientific concepts such as life [11], thermal physics [20] and energy [17,21], matter (atoms, molecules) [11], substance [13,22], chemical bonds [23], chemical change [24], equilibrium [14] and chemistry in general [25]. Based on our literature research, the conceptual profile of chemical analysis has not been developed yet and, additionally, it has been many years since alternative means of assessing students' understanding of chemical analysis were considered as necessary [26]. ...
Building the Conceptual Profile of Chemical Analysis: The Sociocultural Domain.
Conference Paper
  • Mar 2024
The conceptual profile framework is based on the assumption that people exhibit various modes of thinking that are used in various contexts. Chemical analysis is a central concept of chemistry and is characterized by a worthwhile polysemy, which is observed in both scientific and everyday language, such as the one employed in science classrooms. The purpose of this study is the development of the conceptual profile of chemical analysis, as a tool for characterizing the heterogeneity of students’ ways of speaking and, therefore, thinking about it. The conceptual profile is composed of several zones. Each zone represents a specific way of thinking about the given concept and emerges from the study of this concept in different genetic domains. In the present study, the concept of chemical analysis is explored within the sociocultural genetic domain via examination of relevant secondary historical and epistemological literature. As a result, the following six conceptual profile zones which are related to the foundations of the concept of chemical analysis are proposed: chemical analysis as (a) everyday practices, (b) alchemist analysis, (c) empirical techniques, (d) classical analysis, (e) classical instrumental analysis and (f) a contemporary tool for society. Refinement and enrichment of the above proposed zones will follow by studying the ontogenetic and microgenetic domains of chemical analysis.
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... People can have multiple conceptual profile zones about a disciplinary idea, but they will employ a particular way of thinking depending on the context they encounter. For instance, a person can think about energy as something that living entities use to do certain actions, as a material entity that can be stored in several systems and transferred to other systems, and as a subject of conservation, degradation, transformation, and transfer (Aguiar et al. 2018). If a person is trying to explain the function of a battery, this person can think of energy as something that can be stored in a device. ...
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The language of science has many words and phrases whose meaning either changes in differing contexts or alters to reflect developments in a given discipline. This book presents the authors’ theories on using ‘conceptual profiles’ to make the teaching of context-dependent meanings more effective. Developed over two decades, their theory begins with a recognition of the coexistence in the students’ discourse of those alternative meanings, even in the case of scientific concepts such as molecule, where the dissonance between the classical and modern views of the same phenomenon is an accepted norm. What began as an alternative model of conceptual change has evolved to incorporate a sociocultural approach, by drawing on ideas such as situated cognition and Vygotsky’s influential concept of culturally located learning. Also informed by pragmatist philosophy, the approach has grown into a well-rounded theory of teaching and learning scientific concepts. The authors have taken the opportunity in this book to develop their ideas further, anticipate and respond to criticisms—that of relativism, for example—and explain how their theory can be applied to analyze the teaching of core concepts in science such as heat and temperature, life and biological adaptation. They also report on the implementation of a research program that correlates the responsiveness of their methodology to all the main developments in the field of science education. This additional material will inform academic discussion, review, and further enhancement of their theory and research model.
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Metaphors We Live By
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  • Apr 1980
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
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This chapter deals with practical implications of the conceptual profile theory to the design and development of teaching sequences, using as an example a teaching project in thermal physics with 9th grade students in Brazil. We start with a discussion of a simplified version of the heat conceptual profile model built by Amaral and Mortimer, and then we show how the contents and activities of the teaching sequence fit with the learning demands related to this simplified model. Next, we examine the learning contexts and micro-contexts of the activities that have proved effective in promoting understanding of the potentialities and limitations of the prescientific zones of heat and introducing and strengthening the scientific way of thinking. Finally, we present classroom teaching episodes that indicate how the alternation between authoritative and dialogic discourse contributes to enhance students’ awareness of the heat conceptual profile. The work allowed us to indicate the heuristic potential of this theoretical framework for innovative teaching practices in science education.
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The Epistemological Grounds of the Conceptual Profile Theory
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In this chapter, we discuss the charge that the conceptual profile theory would be relativist. After contrasting rationalism and relativism, we elaborate the epistemological grounds of the theory in terms of an objective pragmatism, drawing on Peirce’s and Dewey’s philosophies, and discuss the differences between this philosophical position and relativist views. For a pragmatist, there is no problem in comparing different ways of thinking, provided that this comparison is not made in abstract, but always with a clear connection to concrete situations in which we should make decisions and act. From this we derive one of the learning goals in the profile theory: to become aware of the several modes of thinking available in a sociocultural circumstance and of the domains in which their application shows pragmatic value.
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The Heterogeneity of Discourse in Science Classrooms: The Conceptual Profile Approach
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  • Nov 2012
In this chapter, we address the heterogeneity in thinking and talking in science classrooms from the perspective of the conceptual profile approach. In order to model the different ways of conceptualizing objects and events that a person can employ, we introduce the conceptual profile approach and discuss learning from that perspective, as the related processes of enriching an individual’s conceptual profile and becoming aware of the heterogeneity of thought and language, and the contexts in which distinct modes of thinking can be applied. We also consider how the conceptual profile approach fits into an analysis of classroom discourse, by arguing that it provides a heuristically powerful tool to analyze the cognitive dimension of discourse. We also offer an example of classroom discourse analysis in order to illustrate the use of conceptual profiles.
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