The experiential gestalt of causation: a common core to pupils’ preconceptions in science

Research on pupils’ alternative frameworks in science is an expanding field, generating a great deal of interesting empirical material. There is a need to find common elements in the seemingly quite disparate research results, in order that the various findings form a cohesive group, and also to achieve a deeper understanding of the pupils’ reasoning. This article represents an attempt in this direction. We will try to demonstrate that there is a common core to the pupils’ explanations and predictions in such widely differing areas as temperature and heat, electricity, optics and mechanics. This core will be called the experiential gestalt of causation. Its parts are agent, instrument and object. A full and varied set of examples is given, both to document our assertions and to offer the reader an introduction to the interesting results from this branch of research.