The authors are especially concerned about the need for teachers to confront students' naive conceptions directly, and both to teach and to demonstrate why scientific concepts are preferable. Students are often thinking and building theories about the facts they learn in class, thinking that is unrecognized and neglected but can be elicited through probing questions. Thought and Language . Using his own research and that of Piaget and Claparede, as well as the pedagogical writings of Tolstoy and Rousseau, Vygotsky argues persuasively for a two-way process of concept formation. Spontaneous concepts tend to be unsystematic and generally unstated, if not entirely unconscious.
Scientific concepts are abstract and systematic.