Call for Monographs

This series is looking for monographs, reviews, and collections of papers that would be the basis for future research on the development of student understanding in science education.

Sample issues include:
What is the stage of the students’ intellectual development?

How can the instructor enable the student to resolve cognitive dissonance in the difficulties students have in transcending their misconceptions toward target ideas?

Students can have great difficulty reading scientific texts and trying to cope with the professor in the classroom. Part of the reason for student’s difficulties is that for a student taking a science gateway course the language and epistemology of science are akin to a foreign culture. For many students in the introductory gateway course, although individual words are understandable, the sentences appear to take the form of an unknown language.

What is the students’ world view; knowledge-in-pieces as described by diSessa, a coherent theory as described for example by Posner, Strike, Hewson, and Gertzog or and an ontological view as described by Chi.

What instructional supports are necessary for students to examine their own ideas and compare them to the ideas presented by peers, the textbook, and the instructor? Feyerabend (1993, p.33) has pointed out that evaluation of a theoretical framework doesn’t occur until there is an alternative (principle of counter induction.)

Relating epistemic change to conceptual change in students.

All inquiries and papers may be directed to Series Editor Calvin S. Kalman: Calvin.Kalman@concordia.ca