COGNITIVE AND METACOGNITIVE ASPECTS IN CONCEPTUAL CHANGE BY ANALOGY

This study is a qualitative investigation on the teaching-learning by analogy of complex curriculum concepts in natural and relevant environ ments, such as classrooms, to improve the ecological validity of the r esearch itself. It aimed at exploring whether students' successful use of analogy in learning science was related a) to the level of their u nderstanding of a specific analogy and b) to their metacognitive aware ness of how the analogy was to be used and of the changes produced in their own conceptual structures. During the implementation of a biolog ical curriculum unit, sixty 5th graders were engaged in understanding the ways in which the new concepts (concerning the human circulatory s ystem) were similar to a familiar source (the mail delivery system) by detecting all the relations between the two systems and mapping the r elevant information from the source to the target. Learners' preexisti ng mental models have been taken into account in order to examine thei r conceptual growth and change via the analogy. Qualitative data are p resented for the analysis of elicited and spontaneous analogical infer ences, based on structural and semantic similarities, as well as of th e identification of where the analogy breaks down. Moreover, qualitati ve data also concern children's metacognitive awareness of the meaning and the purpose of the analogy, and their personal use of the analogy in changing initial conceptions. As hypothesized, results showed a hi gh correlation between level of conceptual understanding of the new sc ience topic, level of understanding of the analogy itself, and the eff ective use of the analogy in integrating the new information into the pre-existing conceptual structures. Some implications on the use of an alogy for conceptual change are considered from an educational standpo int.