Conceptual Development
An important part of child psychology is how understanding of the children about the world develops. For e.g. children build up a conception of themselves as individuals, of other people as people outside their family or as members of their family, of physical laws and so on.
One of the main stages of conceptual development is building up the idea of object durability. Very young babies do not try to look for an attractive object which is hidden. As they grow older, they get acquainted that the object still exists and they search for it.
Other main ideas in conceptual development are pattern recognition (learning to identify and ultimately to predict patterns) and conceptual operations (learning to think in conceptual terms, making use of conceptual language).
The conceptual development stage of theory-building research has been extensively discussed and debated in numerous disciplines, most particularly in management and sociology theory. The number and breadth of these contributions makes it difficult for several human resource development theorists to select the most suitable framework or process to follow, and a framework or guidelines that are further needed for the development of HRD theory.
This grounded study adds towards that gap. The study revealed that a five-component framework of conceptual development appeared from making an HRD theory on human capital transformation.
Now let’s have a look on how students’ conceptual development takes place in a data-driven classroom.
The data-driven classroom parallels are teaching strategy by making use of the notion of conceptual change. Methods that take benefit of conceptual change identify that students bring pre-existing concepts to new courses.
These concepts may be incomplete, misconceptions or inadequate. Learning takes place when a student turns out to be dissatisfied with their understanding, observes that concept is compatible with their other knowledge, finds the concept to be useful and develops a new concept.
Conceptual change is dependent upon constructivism, a model of learning which says that understanding and knowledge are build up in the learner’s mind, with the learning attempting to make sense of new observations in light of past pre-conceptions and experiences.
This fits well in the data-driven classroom. When students are given new data, they already possess some pre-existing concept of how matter behaves. Students can extend or change their concepts for being consistent with the new data.
Therefore, the students’ concepts are pushed towards a more sophisticated understanding of matter at the atomic level. Instructor creativity is required for presenting data so that students develop their understanding in a timely and reasonable manner.
