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**Chapter 2** 

© 2012 Van der Steen et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Using the Dynamics of a Person-Context** 

Steffie Van der Steen, Henderien Steenbeek and Paul Van Geert

Understanding refers to "the ability to understand", which means "to comprehend, to apprehend the meaning or import of, or to grasp the idea of [something]" (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). Understanding is a key concept within all fields of study concerning learning and development, such as cognitive psychology, pedagogy, educational sciences, and developmental psychology. Within these fields of study, understanding has been studied for different domains, such as scientific reasoning (e.g., Grotzer, 2004; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958/2001; Rappolt-Schlichtmann, Tenenbaum, Koepke, & Fischer, 2007), social development (e.g., Blijd-Hogeweys, 2008), mathematics (e.g., Dehaene, 1997; Gilmore & Bryant, 2008), and many more. In the field of education, children's understanding is especially important, as understanding involves deep knowledge of concepts, and the active manipulation of this knowledge in the form of explaining, predicting, applying, and generalizing (Perkins & Blythe, 1994). A model of understanding can give guidance to both researchers and educators dealing with children's understanding and the development of their understanding. In this chapter, we will present such a model, based on dynamic Systems and Skill Theory principles. The model is illustrated throughout this chapter with examples of children's understanding of scientific concepts, or more specifically, children's understanding of air flow and air pressure during a syringe task, which is described below. The syringes task is designed to let children explore how air flows through a system, and to introduce them to the relationship between pressure and volume, as well as the way in which pressure can exert forces on objects (see also De Berg, 1995). Although there are some basic questions the researcher asks every child during the administration of the task, most of the interaction between the boy and the researcher emerges in real-time, i.e. during the

**System to Describe Children's** 

**Understanding of Air Pressure** 

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/53935

**1. Introduction** 

task itself.

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