Inhibition and Conceptual Learning in Science: a Review of Studies

Recent research about the learning of science has suggested that misconceptions are not replaced by scientific conceptions and extinguished once conceptual change has occurred. Rather, misconceptions still exist alongside the acquired scientific conceptions and must be suppressed in order to use scientific conceptions. Our goal in this review is to understand the conditions under which the executive function of inhibition plays a role in conceptual learning in science domains. We reviewed 18 articles in the extant literature that report investigations involving students at different educational levels, from primary to higher education, in order to identify how inhibition and science conceptual learning are measured and the conditions in which a link between the executive function and the outcome variable emerges. Part of the reviewed studies are based on behavioral data, while the others are based on both behavioral and brain imaging data. The review shows that the majority of the studies at each educational level reveal that inhibition contributes to topic-specific learning in science domains, or to overall academic achievement in science. Neuroscientific studies provide evidence that inhibition is recruited during the execution of tasks that require suppression of misconception interference. Comprehensive models of conceptual change should consider inhibitory control, which may also account for individual differences in this process.