TRENDS AND FOUNDATIONS IN RESEARCH ON STUDENTS’ CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING IN SCIENCE EDUCATION: A METHOD BASED ON THE STRUCTURAL TOPIC MODEL

Concepts and principles are the basic building blocks of scientific knowledge, and understanding a concept is a prerequisite to making complex inferences or accomplishing any scientific work with it (Reif, 1995). Therefore, it is crucial for students to attain conceptual understanding. Enormous interest from science educators has been captured by research into students’ conceptual understanding, and many articles on it have been published since 1980 (Tsai & Wen, 2005). However, it is not clear what aspects of students’ conceptual understanding these papers were concerned with, or which aspects are likely to attract more interest from researchers. This information might be important for researchers to reflect upon within their own research foci and plan further investigations (Lin et al., 2019). Therefore, this study focused on the trends and foundations of research on students’ conceptual understanding. Before identifying the trends and foundations of present research, it is necessary to define students’ conceptual understanding. The research on students’ conceptual understanding was initiated by the research on the constructivist view of learning, knowledge, and understanding. According to the constructivist view of learning, the growth of understanding always involves a learner constructing his or her own private understanding of some part of the public knowledge. Here, students’ own private understanding was often described as misconception (the use of “mis-” applies only when one implicitly compares a student’s private conception with some public, accepted meaning (Bezzi, 1996; Pines & West, 1986)). Of course, students’ private understanding can be described not only as misconceptions (Brumby, 1984; Cho et al., 1985; Gallegos et al., 1994; Taber, 2014) but also as preconceptions, alternative conceptions, alternative frameworks, alternative conceptual frameworks, intuitive theories, mini-theories (Taber, 2015a), prior knowledge (Taber, 2015b), and students’ conceptions (a collection of related and interrelated conceptions that students hold, see M. Hewson & P. Hewson, 1983). To illustrate the above constructing process, Posner et al. (1982) used conceptual change to describe it. Conceptual change means a people’s central, organizing concept changing from one set of concepts to a different set that is incompatible with the first (Posner et al., 1982). To date, conceptual Abstract. This study aims to reveal the trends and foundations in research on students’ conceptual understanding in science education. The literature was selected from three recognized journals in science education. The Structural Topic Model (STM) method was used to categorize articles into ten topics considering information about the semantic cohesion and exclusivity of words to topics. The topic, which has attracted increasing research interest, was selected using a method similar to standard regression analysis, and its changing focus was identified through an analysis of its research contents. Foundations of research about students’ conceptual understanding between 1980–1999 and 2000–2019 were obtained through a review of their top 10 most-cited papers. Three conclusions were drawn: a) there were ten sub-topics of research about students’ conceptual understanding; b) the research on the development (or pathways) of students’ scientific argumentation/reasoning is likely to attract further interest in the future; and c) compared to the studies in the first period, the studies in the second stage favor research on the description (nature, mental process, etc.) of the process of students’ conceptual understanding as the research foundation.