Warm conceptual change

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Beyond cold conceptual change (Pintrich, Marx, and Boyle,1993)

Classroom contextual factors

affect situational motivational factors

that interact with cognitive factors

and with mediating conditions

to produce conceptual changes.

Class tasks, projects: meaningful, challenging, authentic to life outside school/college.

Authority relationships: optimal choice and optimal challenge (novelty, difficulty, surprise).

Evaluation: not comparative and competitive, but improvement-based, mistakes treated as positive

Classroom management: use of time; norms for engagement

Teacher verbalization and modeling of scientific thinking, scientific dispositions, coping, strategies.

Teacher scaffolding of cognition, motivation, interaction.

Classroom community committed to understanding

Mastery (learning) goals vs. performance goals (grades, beating others) vs. focus on the self.

Epistemic goals: avoiding closure vs. seeking closure; best answer vs. any answer.

Personal interest--general attitude or preference--in a subject matter.

Perceived utility value, exchange value, of a subject matter

Importance, salience, significance of the subject matter to the learner, relative to self-schema.

Self-efficacy beliefs, about one's capabilities for tasks in specific domains.

Control beliefs: I can do this; If I do this, I will accomplish that; I can learn and get good grades.

Selective attention, e.g., to become dissatisfied with one's idea, one must attend to the discrepant information.

Activation of prior knowledge

Deeper processing, e.g. elaboration, paraphrasing, summarizing; organization, concept mapping, networking.

Problem finding and solving

Metacognitive evaluation and control, e.g., comparing one's current idea and an alternative idea.

Volitional control and regulation, e.g. persistence.

Dissatisfaction with one's current conception of a matter: shows problems it doesnt' solve.

Intelligibility to the learner of an alternative conception of the same matter; learner's ability to represent the alternative.

Plausibility to the learner of an alternative conception of the same matter; it seems to fit their current ecology of ideas.

Learner's estimate of the fruitfulness of an alternative conception of the same matter; it opens to something interesting, worthwhile.

For example, conception of pupils as diverse constructors of meaning, as distinct from containers for receiving information.

For example, a conception of organisms as randomly varying and naturally selected, as distinct from designed, and from enacting their essence, and from striving for the form in which we now see them.

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Statements from the source text
Pintrich, P. R., Marx, R. W., & Boyle, R. A. (1993). Beyond cold conceptual change: The role of motivational beliefs and classroom contextual factors in the process of conceptual change. Review of Educational Research, 63 (2), 167-199.

Research on student cognition has demonstrated that students' prior conceptual knowledge influences all aspects of students' processing of information from their perception of the cues in the environment, to their selective attention to tehse cues, to their encoding and levels of processing of information, to their search for retrieval of information and comprehension, to their thinking and problem solving. . . . [C]ognition-only models of student learning do not adequately explain why students who seem to have the requisite prior conceptual knowledge do not activtate this knowledge for many school tasks, let alone out-of-school tasks . . . [W]e will discuss both individual differences in motivational beliefs as well as classroom contextual factors that may contribute to this problem. (p. 167-8, emphasis added)

These three aspects of an individual's behavior--choice of task, level of engagement or activity in the task, and willingness to persist in the task--are the three traditional behavioral indicators of motivation. . . [T]here has been little research or theory development that attempts to link motivation and cognition. . . it seems important to begin to build the connections between the motivational and cognitive components of student learning. . . . Besides the intraindividual links between motivational and cognitive components of learning, the actual classroom context may influences tudents' movation and cognition and, most importantly, interaction between these two constructs. . . . The purpose of this article is to present a conceptual analysis of the relations between motivational factors and student cognition as well as an analysis of classroom contextual factors that my condition the relations between student motivation and cognition. (p. 168-9)

[T]here is beginning to be a remarkable consistency at a macrolevel of analysis in that the cognitive factors that influence learning including knowledge, cognitive learning strategies, problem solving or thinking strategies, and matacognitive and self-regulation strategies. (p. 174).A second assumption of our model is that these various cogntive processes can be influenced by students' motivational beliefs. . . Our list of motivational beliefs is derived from a social cognitive perspective on motivation that highlights the important role that students' beliefs and interpretations of actual events play in motivational dynamics. (p. 176)The research that examines the interaction of these different types of goals, cognition, and conceptual change should focus on domain-specific measures and link them to students' cognition and conceptual change for very specific types of cognitive tasks and content, not use omnibus measures of goals that may not be related to the more specific knowledge and strategy in different domains. (p. 181)[T]he learners' contribution to the zone of proximal development can be seen to have three essential features: p;rior knowledge and conceptual understanding of the of the subject matter, cognitive strategies and tools for mastering new learning, and motivational ffactos such as self-efficacy bneliefs that aserve to mediate the studen's attempts at learning new and potentially difficult material. (p. 187)

Our critique of the conceptual change model raises four issues. First, prior knowledge plays a paradoxical role in conceptual change . . . The second issues pertains to the implications and limitations of the conceptual ecology metaphor . . . Third, the model states foour conditions for conceptual change . . depicted as if they operated in a cold rational manner . . . The fourth issue is the validity of the notions of child as scientist and the classroom as a community of scientists . . . (p. 192)

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6/27/2003 tom bird

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