1. Constructivist learning posits that new knowledge is built upon prior knowledge and understanding develops gradually through challenging existing conceptions. 2. Conceptual change involves identifying alternative conceptions, promoting dissatisfaction with them through discrepant events, sharing the scientific conception, and providing opportunities to transfer the new conception. 3. Enhancing science understanding involves providing access to prior knowledge, organizing knowledge through graphic organizers, scaffolding learning through teacher support within students' zones of proximal development, and building learning communities through cooperative activities.

1. Chapter 3. Learning Science With understanding SCED 570, Fall 2011

3. Learning is a construction based on the learner’s prior knowledge

4. New knowledge is always based on the prior or existing knowledge that learners bring to learning situation

5. Construct knowledge with understanding in science

6. Knowledge: integrated, growing in completeness, transferred to a wide range of contexts and situations

8. Provide learners with opportunities to challenge inconsistencies between personal thinking and accepted science explanations

10. Identify alternative conceptions

11. Promote dissatisfaction with alternative conceptions (discrepant events)

12. Share science conceptions

13. Provide for transfer of new conceptions

19. Venn diagram

21. Zone of proximal development (ZPD) – Vygotsky’s idea that what can be learned cooperatively can then be done individually.

22. Teacher provides suggestions, questions, prompts, hints

23. Students clarify, elaborate, provide evidence

25. Teachers:

26. establish the learning environment

27. Make learner ideas more meaningful through comment, elaboration, questioning

28. Promote dialogue amongst learners