Investigating the Implications of the Connectionist Views of the Concept in Conceptual Learning of Science

연결주의 개념관이 과학 개념학습에 주는 시사점 고찰

Conceptual teaming has been one of the important issue in science education, and its theory and method has been interacted with the studies of philosophy of science, cognitive science, and cognitive psychology. The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of the study on brain-style computation, i.e. connectionism. This study aimed to investigate the properties of the connectionist views of the concept and its implications in the conceptual learning of science. In connectionist views, a concept was represented as a pattern of activity distributed over many connected units, and a kind of network composed of many sub-concept units. And the ＇distributed representation＇ had the features of the constructivity, the automatically generalization, and the tunability. On the base of these views, it was suggested that (ⅰ) ＇Typically-Perceived-Situation＇, a kind of mental representation rising spontaneously in an individual mind when someone is thinking about any object, should be highlighted, and (ⅱ) the roles of the sub-concept units in formation of concept and the resolution of concept into the sub-concept units should be highlighted. Finally the meanings of these implications in conceptual teaming of science are discussed.