Salzman et al., Conceptual Change in Precollege Engineering Proceedings of the Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - Madrid 1 Conceptual Change in Precollege Engineering Noah Salzman Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA nsalzman@purdue.edu Johannes Strobel Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA jstrobel@purdue.edu Abstract: Conceptual change is the process where an individual’s understanding of a particular process or phenomenon changes to a more sophisticated, accurate, or expert- like understanding of the same phenomenon. Although well utilized in the learning sciences, conceptual change has not been used as a theoretical framework for engineering education research. This paper provides an overview of conceptual change theories for the engineering education research community. These theories can be broadly divided into either revolutionary or evolutionary approaches to conceptual change. An overview of these two categories is provided, along with the differences in how they address various aspects of conceptual change theory. The paper concludes with a theoretical exploration of the relevance of these theories to precollege engineering education. Introduction Conceptual change is the process where an individual’s understanding of a particular process or phenomenon changes to a more sophisticated, accurate, or expert understanding of the same phenomenon. Conceptual change is one of the most used theories in the learning sciences. Although well researched in the natural sciences, especially physics, conceptual change has not been commonly utilized as a theoretical framework for engineering education research, particularly for understanding engineering learning at the K-12 level. While searching for published material on conceptual change and engineering, one is most likely to find articles that either (a) assess the effect of engineering on science concepts (for example, see Schnittka & Bell’s, 2011 article Engineering Design and Conceptual Change in Science: Addressing thermal energy and heat transfer in eighth grade) or (b) articles, which describe exclusively the scientific aspects of engineering (for example, see: Krause, Kelly, Tasooji, Corkins, Baker, & Purzer’s, (2010) Effect of pedagogy on conceptual change in an introductory materials science course”). It is puzzling, why there seem to be no clearly developed unique concepts in the domain of engineering. It might be partially explained by that engineering is commonly defined as the practical application of science and math and so other conceptual domains might not be seen necessary. Still the fact that the conceptual basis of engineering seems to be entirely borrowed from other domains, requires further investigation. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide an introduction into the different models of conceptual change and (2) assess the usefulness and adequacy of different models in order to explain learning and understanding of engineering in K- 12. The broader goal is to contribute to a discussion on the conceptual basis of engineering. Models of Conceptual Change Models of conceptual change can be differentiated by the answers they provide to several key questions: (1) How is change happening? Models of conceptual change tend to take either a revolutionary approach to conceptual change where change is seen as happening extremely quickly in response to anomalous data or cognitive dissonance, or an evolutionary approach where change is seen as something that happens gradually over time(Vosniadou, 2008). (2) What is changing? The literature distinguishes between granular and individual concepts to entire systems of concepts, so called mental models(diSessa & Sherrin, 1998). (3) How stable are conceptual understandings? Different models