Resumen de Conceptual change in physics: children's naive representations of sound

Karine Mazens, Jacques Lautrey

• The organization of physics knowledge (degree of coherence and nature of conceptual change) was studied in 89 6–10-year-old children using the concept of sound. We attempted to determine whether children apply properties of objects to sound or if they consider sounds as a vibratory process. Three properties of physical objects were studied: substantiality, weight, and permanence. The younger children considered sound more like an object than the older children did. Substantiality was attributed to sound more often than were weight and permanence. Based on the substantiality data, four mental models were identified (sound cannot pass through other objects unless there are holes, sound can pass through solids if it is harder than they are, sound is immaterial, sound is a vibratory process). We concluded that conceptual change in knowledge about sound does not happen through the sudden transfer of the concept from the ontological category of matter to the ontological category of processes, but rather through a slow and gradual process of belief revision, in the course of which the various properties of matter are abandoned in a hierarchical order.