Multiple local conceptual coherences: student understanding as locally stable patterns requiring stability explanations¶

Theory · All theories
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The framework holds that student understanding and behavior are variable yet exhibit stabilities local to moments and settings. The author introduces the term to "capture the notion that understanding and behavior are often quite variable, while still exhibiting stabilities that are local to moments and settings." Rather than treating change as the central problem, the framework explains locally coherent patterns of thinking through mechanisms that stabilize them, drawing on both knowledge-based (cuing and reliability of intuitive knowledge pieces) and participation-based (interactional behaviors, material affordances) accounts. It is applied to a case of college physics students' reasoning about tickertape representations of motion.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Analysis must attend to both the substance of ideas students orient to and the real-time activity and setting in which thinking occurs

Constraints¶

• A full analysis of the dynamics of the students' later thinking was beyond the scope of the paper; the account covers only the stability of the initial pattern

Target Learners¶

• college introductory physics students

Target Learning Objectives¶

• conceptual understanding of motion representations

Claims¶

Related Theories¶

• Knowledge in Pieces — the knowledge-based account of variable thinking this framework draws on
• Multiple local coherences: stability of student thinking as sustained by real-time activity

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Frank, B. W. (2009). Multiple Conceptual Coherences in the Speed Tutorial: Micro-processes of Local Stability. https://eric.ed.gov