University of Massachusetts

John Clement

Professor Emeritus


TECS Department
College of Education

Scientific Reasoning Research Institute
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

Email: clement@umass.edu

Personal Interests

I grew up in the Chicago area and on a lake in Southern Wisconsin where I had access to sailboats and iceboats. I live in western Massachusetts on the edge of woods that provide us with hiking, cross country skiing, and off-trail snowshoeing .  We also enjoy kayaking and visits to the Maine islands in the summer, with occasional sailboat charters.  Other recent favorite trips include music history tours in Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe, and tracing some family history in Wiltshire, England (to 1480!) and in WWII air bases in Suffolk.

Academic Interests 

Over my career my interdisciplinary interests have included:  research on expert reasoning and creative model construction in science, with an emphasis on the roles of analogy, imagery, and thought experiments; and the role of intuitive knowledge structures and mental model construction processes in science students, especially in physics and biology.  I have been working on expert reasoning in science continuously since the beginning of my career.  I’ve been able to apply findings from this research to studies of science learning issues in education, with the help of support from the National Science Foundation. 

Recent Publications

Clement, J. J. (2022). Multiple levels of heuristic reasoning processes in scientific model construction. Frontiers in Psychology, Cognition, 13.  (Open access.) doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.750713    https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.750713/full
This article consolidates heuristics from three large think-aloud and history of science studies and places them into four, nested, hierarchical levels. The lowest level is seen as grounded in perceptual motor processes in the brain.

Nunez-Oviedo, M. and Clement, J. (2019).  Large scale scientific modeling practices that can organize science instruction at the unit and lesson levels.  Frontiers in Education, 4:68, doi: 10.3389/feduc.2019.00068. (Open Access:  Link)

Clement, J. J. (2018). Reasoning patterns in Galileo’s analysis of machines and in expert protocols: Roles for analogy, imagery, and mental simulation. Topoi, 1-13. 
PDF

Clement, J. (2013). Roles for explanatory models and analogies in conceptual change.  In S. Vosniadou (Ed.), International handbook of research on conceptual change, Second Edition, 412-446. New York: Routledge. 
PDF

Clement, J. (2009). The role of imagistic simulation in scientific thought experiments. TOPICS in Cognitive Science, 1: 686-710.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01031.x/epdf

 

Other research articles are shown in my:

Publications List

 


Books

Clement, John (2008). Creative Model Construction in Scientists and Students: The Role of Imagery, Analogy, and Mental Simulation. Dordrecht: Springer.

Softcover edition (2009)

This monograph presents a theory of creativity and imagery based conceptual learning in science that was developed on the basis of think aloud protocols from experts.

How do scientists use analogies and other processes to break away from old theories and generate new ones? This book documents such methods through the analysis of video tapes of scientifically trained experts thinking aloud while working on unfamiliar problems. Some aspects of creative scientific thinking are difficult to explain, such as the power of analogies, the use of physical intuition, and the enigmatic ability to learn from thought experiments. The book examines the hypothesis that these processes are based on imagistic mental simulations as an underlying mechanism. This allows the analysis of insight ("Aha!") episodes of creative theory formation. Advanced processes examined include specialized conserving transformations, Gedanken experiments, and adjusted levels of divergence in thinking. Student protocols are used to show that students have natural abilities for many of the same basic reasoning and model construction processes and that this has important implications for expanding instructional theories of conceptual change and inquiry.

Table of Contents (.pdf 124K)
Annotated Table of Contents

 

 

Clement, John , Rea-Ramirez, Mary Anne, Editors (2008). Model Based Learning and Instruction in Science.   Dordrecht: Springer.

This collection of studies by our research team describes new, model based teaching methods in science instruction and presents research results on their characteristics and effectiveness.
The book describes these new methods in a diverse group of settings: middle school biology, high school physics, and college chemistry classrooms. Six different levels of organization for teaching strategies are described, from those operating over months (design of the sequence of units in a curriculum) to those operating over minutes (teaching tactics for guiding discussion minute by minute. )

Table of Contents (.doc 100K)


Preconceptions in Mechanics: Lessons Dealing With Conceptual Difficulties

by Charles Camp and John Clement. Contributing authors: David Brown, Kimberly Gonzalez, John Kudukey, James Minstrell, Klaus Schultz, Melvin Steinberg, Valerie Veneman, and Aletta Zietsman. 2nd Edition, 2008. College Park, MD: American Association of Physics Teachers.

The nine units in this high school physics curriculum guide focus on areas where students have exhibited qualitative preconceptions -- ideas that they bring to class with them prior to instruction in physics -- that conflict with the physicist's conceptions. It has also shown that some of these conflicting preconceptions are quite persistent and seem to resist change in the face of normal instructional techniques. The motivating idea for this book is to provide a set of lessons that are aimed specifically at these particularly troublesome areas and that use special techniques for dealing with them. Other preconceptions contain important, useful intuitions that lessons can build on to foster sensemaking. Ideas in the lessons can be used to supplement any course that includes mechanics.

Free pre-publication version pdf

Published Version (spiral bound, includes CD Rom with customizable student materials in Word format) is available from AAPT at: www.aapt.org/Store/index.cfm
American Association of Physics Teachers
Phone: 301-209-3333 Fax: 301-209-0845 Email
Web: http://www.aapt.org

 


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