This project will investigate existing examples of conceptual change over a range of topics in physics in order to discern different types of conceptual change and to identify instructional strategies effective at inducing them. The result will be a taxonomy of conceptual change which associates types of conceptual change with instructional strategies to facilitate the change process. These strategies will be developed on the basis of the investigators' classroom experience and a careful study of current work in student conceptions and conceptual change, as well as selected examples of conceptual change in the history of mechanics. The field work will gather information about students' conceptions through various interview and diagnostic methods as well as computationally- based protocol analysis, including use of computational linguistics, term clustering and knowledge representation. This work will provide information for building conceptual representations which will explictly depict particular elements and organizations of students' conceptions that are critical to the process of conceptual change. The utility of natural language processing and other computional analyses in extracting information and the development of conceptual representations will be demonstrated. These techniques will guide the construction of the conceptual change taxonomy. This research will have several outcomes: 1) a deeper understanding of the role of conceptions in understanding physics and solving physics problems, demonstrating that the task of physics instruction is one of changing belief systems and not merely one of imparting facts and problem- solving skills, 2) a more detailed analysis of alternative conceptions and the nature of conceptual change and 3) a taxonomy of conceptual change associated with strategies which seem to induce particular types of conceptual change that can guide teachers in the classroom.
