• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.347-355
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• 1998

This paper reports on a way of using cognitive conflict in order to bring about conceptual changes. Cognitive conflict occurs when there is a discrepancy in students mind between everyday events and the scientific concepts which are used to explain these events. In order to overcome this conflict auxiliary scientific hypotheses can be introduced, which makes the resolution easier. In this paper, we suggest a new model of conceptual change and a model of instruction named 'structured contrastive activity' which consists of three stages: contrastive discussion by introducing the auxiliary hypotheses for clarifying the cognitive conflicts of students, observing the phenomena in idealised contexts in order to increase the status of the scientific concepts, laboratory experiments which bridge the two contexts.