Models of conceptual change in science learning: establishing an exhaustive inventory based on support given by articles published in major journals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we propose an analysis of the state of, and trends in, the field of conceptual change research in science education through the lens of its models. Using a quantitative approach, we reviewed all conceptual change articles (n = 245) published in five major journals in the field of science education in search of the support that their authors give to conceptual change models (CC models). We looked for support in the form of explicit or implicit mentions, favourable and unfavourable position statements and empirical confirmations and refutations. The results present a thorough description of all types of support, as well as their evolution from the early days of the field to today. We also propose a hierarchical list of the 86 CC models that we have recorded, appearing in decreasing order by the support they received from the literature. General comments are formulated in order to provide an interpretation of the field and its evolution.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.061 | 0.240 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.052 | 0.038 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".