Ten aanzien van begrippen uit de mechanica:
"Rather than being defined, these terms are introduced by exposure to examples of their use, examples provided by someone who already belongs to the speech community in which they are current."
"terms are applied by someone who already knows how to use them."
Kuhn ten aanzien van het "ostensive element", het schijnbaar overtuigende:
"terms are taught through the exhibit, direct or by description, of situations to which they apply."
Kuhn maakt ook onderscheid tussen Newtonian en Aristotelian/children ideas and view, met betrekking tot concept change:
"I still remember the contrived lecture-demonstration - a block of ice sliding on a sheet of glass - that helped me undo prior intuïtions and acquire the Newtonian concept of `force'."
Kuhn: Theory Change as Structure Change: Comments on the Sneed Formalism in: Erkentniss 10 (1976) pp 179-199.
Redish verwijst naar een vergelijkbare passage van Kuhn in The structure of:
The presence of "false" preconceptions really isn't so surprising if we think about our students' previous experience. Why should we be surprised that students think that any moving object will eventually come to a stop? In their direct personal experience that is always the case. It's even the case in the demonstrations we show in class to demonstrate the opposite! When I slide a dry-ice levitated puck across the lecture table, I catch it and stop it at the end of the table. If I didn't, it would slide off the table, bounce, roll a short distance, and stop. Every student knows that. Yet I ask them to focus on a small piece of the demonstration -- the stretch of about four or five seconds when the puck is sliding along the table smoothly -- and extend that observation in their minds to infinity. The student and the teacher are focusing on different aspects of the same physical phenomena.
Edward F. Redish: The Implications of Cognitive Studies for Teaching Physics
This article first appeared in the American Journal of Physics,62(6), 796-803 (1994) ; ©1994, American Association of Physics Teachers. (zie m'n archief)