EFFECTIVENESS OF HOLISTIC MENTAL MODEL CONFRONTATION IN DRIVING CONCEPTUAL CHANGE

Students' flawed conceptions can often be corrected during learning by successive contradictions from text sentences, allowing them to revise or replace their individual false beliefs as they read a text. Although this process supports learning new knowledge at a local level (i.e., individual propositions) it is less effective in facilitating systemic conceptual change. In contrast, constructive processes such as self-explaining can facilitate conceptual change through building a mental model from cumulative revisions of individual false beliefs. In the current experiment, I investigated whether comparing and contrasting examples can achieve the same outcome. Students (n=22) in the compare group were first shown a diagram of with their own flawed mental model, and then asked to compare it with a diagram of the correct model. This condition was compared with self-explaining the correct diagram (n=22), and a control condition in which students simply read the text twice (n=20). Results showed that the compare group performed better than the other two groups on questions requiring deep inference making