Conceptual Profile of Substance
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Conceptual Profile of Substance Representing Heterogeneity of Thinking in Chemistry Classrooms Raúl Orduña Picón 1
& Hannah Sevian
1
& Eduardo F. Mortimer
2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Teachers face challenges when building the concept of substance with students because tensions of meanings emerge from students’ daily life and canonical ideas developed in classrooms. A powerful tool to address learning, pedagogical, and research challenges is the conceptual profile theory. According to this theory, people employ various ways of conceptualizing the world to signify experiences. Conceptual profiles are models of the heterogeneity of modes of thinking and speaking about a given scientific concept which are used in a variety of contexts. To better understand the heterogeneity of thinking/ speaking about substance, the present study aimed to answer: (1) What are the zones that constitute the conceptual profile of substance?; and (2) What ways of thinking and speaking about substance do teachers and students exhibit when engaged in a classroom formative assessment activity? The study adopted an inductive–deductive qualitative analysis approach to analyze secondary data from the history of chemistry, philosophy of chemistry, and student thinking, as well as primary data from student and teacher questionnaires and interviews in eight classrooms, and a formative assessment activity in four of these classrooms. Six conceptual profile zones were found through identifying sets of ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments regarding each zone. Subsequently, the conceptual profile of substance was tested by employing it to reanalyze the formative assessment activity to represent high school students’ and teachers’ thinking about substance. The developed conceptual profile was found to be effective, thus prospectively useful to teachers, in representing the heterogeneity of thinking about substance in chemistry classrooms. Keywords Substance . Conceptual profile theory . Ontological . Epistemological . And axiological commitments
* Hannah Sevian [email protected]
1
Department of Chemistry, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA
2
Faculdade de Educação, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
R. O. Picón et al.
1 Introduction Chemistry, as a technoscience (Chamizo 2013), is a practice that entails the identification, analysis, modeling, and syntheses of substances, as well as the evaluation of the benefits, costs, and risks of the use, production, and transformation of those substances (Sevian and Talanquer 2014). It is a discipline ontologically grounded in the concept of substance (hereafter called substance instead of concept of substance) because, in order to perform their practice, chemists treat substance either as a theoretical or an empirical entity to understand and act upon the reality; however, substance is ultimately conceived as an idealized entity (Fernández-González 2013; Suppe 1989; van Brakel 2014). Based on its relative different ontolog
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