Introduction: Bridging the Cognitive and Sociocultural Approaches in Research on Conceptual Change: Is it Feasible?

Since the late 1970s, traditional research on conceptual change, mainly in science domains, has been situated within the constructivist perspective on learning and instruction, which values the active and interpretative role of the learner. This research has been characterized mainly by a cognitive approach that focuses on analyzing personal mental representations (Murphy & Mason, 2006; Sinatra & Pintrich, 2003; Vosniadou, 1999). More recently, within the socio-cultural approach to cognition, more emphasis has been placed on the situated, interactional process of learning, which includes learning the discourses and social practices of scientific communities. Although several positions can be found in the literature on cognition and understanding in the school context as reflecting the sociocultural approach— from the more to the less extreme—it is grounded on an epistemology and ontology that differ from those of the cognitive approach (Packer & Goicoechea, 2000). After a decade of debate on the potentials and limitations of each approach, a crucial question remains open: Are they so conflicting and incompatible that researchers should situate their work consistently within one or the other? Or can these approaches be complementary or even combined and integrated, at least to some extent, leading to further understanding of the intricacy and complexity of conceptual growth and change processes? In other words, is it theoretically feasible to consider a reconciliation of views focused on the internal processes of the mind or on the sociocultural genesis and appropriation of knowledge? The two approaches will be reviewed in the next sections. This review is intended to focus only on those aspects and concerns that are central to this special issue of Educational Psychologist, and not to examine all aspects and concerns in the extant research. Crucial aspects of the tension between the approaches, underlying the ongoing debate, are then introduced to explore the reasons that might lead to bridging, which are at the basis of the idea of this issue.