Conceptual Structure in Childhood and Adolescence

‘Heat breaks up charcoal and puts sulphur dioxide in’; ‘The air pulls faster on heavy masses.’ These and other similar statements by school-aged children untutored in physics carry two messages. First, children’s pre-instructional conceptions of the physical world are a far cry from the received wisdom of science; second, despite their lack of orthodoxy, children’s conceptions carry a definite sense of causal mechanism. This sense of mechanism is the focal concern of this book, originally publis