Engineering educators strive to help students understand concepts that may be difficult and counterintuitive. This often entails helping students bring their understanding of how a phenomenon works into alignment with the scientifically-accepted explanation. For the most part, fostering conceptual change has been thought of as a process of logically convincing students of validity of the scientifically-accepted explanation. This piece introduces a social-embedded view of conceptual change that takes into account the impact of the group affiliation of the learner. It is suggested that conceptual change is not as a wholly cognitive process, but rather one that is also social in nature.

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Ruth Streveler