Developmental Implications
One of the major goals of this work was to describe the
developmental differences in students’ mental models. The
data collected provide some insights into the differences
between how younger versus older children represent scientific
phenomena.
Developmental theorists offer representational development
hypotheses to explain conceptual development
(e.g., Siegler 1991). Some of their characterizations apply
to the developmental differences seen here in the contents
of children’s mental models. As noted above, Inhelder and
Piaget (1958) claimed that younger children have more
concrete representations while older ones have more
abstract ones. Consistent with this claim, younger students
in this study tended to provide more concrete responses to
the contextualized insulation, referring to the attributes of a
material or object rather than the more abstract concept of
heat flow. Their laboratory notebook entries also indicate
that they focused on the perceptual aspects of the experiment
(i.e., by describing the equipment and setup) while
the older students understood the experiments at a more
conceptual level, as indicated by their mention of the
concepts being taught. This developmental difference is
consistent with proposal that younger children’s concepts
are more perceptual while older children’s are more conceptual.
In relating the results of the present study to these
older theoretical perspectives,