A great deal is known about student thinking in many scientific topics, as this has been a major focus of educational enquiry over several decades. Much of this research has been undertaken from ethnographic or phenomenological perspectives - where the main concern was developing authentic accounts of how students understood a wide range of concept areas, rather than exploring the cognitive processes involved. The theoretical entities invoked to label findings, such as intuitive theories, alternative conceptions and conceptual frameworks have been the subject of much critical debate. The lack of agreement on how learners’ ideas reflect underlying ‘cognitive structure’ has hindered the application of research findings to informing teaching and developing pedagogy. However, theoretical perspectives from areas of cognitive science are increasingly offering more principled frame-works for thinking about the nature of ‘cognitive structures’ and learning proc-esses. In particular, approaches which model cognition as being multi-levelled are beginning to make sense of the diverse and seemingly incoherent range of claims about student thinking in science, and to suggest testable hypotheses. A synthesis of cognitive science and science education research has considerable potential to exemplify a new scientific approach to the study of teaching and learning.

Keywords: learning academic concepts; modelling cognition; learners’ alternative conceptions; conceptual development; understanding science; spontaneous and academic concepts; folk psychology and educational research