Exhaustive Studies Before Covid-19 Pandemic Attack of Students’ Conceptual Change in Science Education: A Literature Review

Abstract

This systematic review is aimed to explore the researches that established students’ conceptual change process, both studies that facilitate conceptual change and studies that determined learner characters influencing conceptual change. Overall, 50 studies were concluded in this review. Study focused on the common characteristics of the studies, the conceptual change instructional interventions used, and the methods used to assess them. This review concludes four averments about the current study: (1) physics subjects have obtained more attention than other science domains; (2) the majority of studies were conducted on undergraduate students of various majors, not only science education students; (3) studies about conceptual change have developed from a cognitive-only perspective to metacognitive aspects; and (4) design on conceptual change study has been dominated by quasi experiment with only pre- and post-intervention. Based on these averments, the authors invite the future empirical studies to consider affective variables in designing instructional approach, focus on examining science pre service teachers’ conceptual change through the implementation of an instructional intervention, and apply qualitative data collection methods regarding affective and metacognitive variables through the implementation of an instructional intervention.