Conceptual questions and lack of formal reasoning: Are they mutually exclusive?

摘要

Using specially designed conceptual question pairs, 9th grade students were tested on tasks (presented as experimental situations in pictorial form) that involved controlling the variables' scheme of formal reasoning. The question topics focused on these three chemical contexts: chemistry in everyday life, chemistry without formal concepts, and chemistry with formal concepts. The second task of each question pair contained three additional questions, designed according to the pillars of the cognitive acceleration through science education (CASE) intervention, which represents a set of activities using the schemata of formal operations aimed at improving children's thinking by accelerating progress towards formal operations in Piaget's terms. The first task did not have these questions. Results showed that some students could solve conceptual problems with specially designed additional questions even when the students could not solve the conceptual problems without such help. Statistical analysis revealed a correlation between the construction-metacognition additional question and the main cognitive conflict question in the second context of chemistry without formal concepts. The results indicate that conceptual questions designed using the CASE pillars have the potential of accelerating students' formal reasoning abilities.