Drawings are often used to obtain an idea of children’s conceptions. Doing so takes for granted an unambiguous relation between conceptions and their representations in drawings. This study was undertaken to gain knowledge of the relation between children’s conceptions and their representation of these conceptions in drawings. A theory of contextualization was the basis for finding out how children related their contextualization of conceptions in conceptual frameworks to their contextualization of drawings in pictorial convention. Eighteen children were interviewed in a semi-structured method while they were drawing the Earth. Audio-recorded interviews, drawings, and notes were analysed to find the cognitive and cultural intentions behind the drawings. Also, even children who demonstrated alternative conceptions of the Earth in the interviews still followed cultural conventions in their drawings. Thus, these alternative conceptions could not be deduced from the drawings. The results indicate that children’s drawings can be used to grasp children’s conceptions only by considering the meaning the children themselves give to their own drawings.

To acknowledge both conceptual and situational factors, childrens' understanding of the Earth was considered from three angles: 1, the perspective as the physical point or direction from which something is seen or depicted; 2. conceptual frameworks; 3. the relevance of explanations in a situation. Fourteen children were interviewed individually in front of a poster of a satellite photo of the Earth. The interviews were semi-structured and focused on what the children understood was depicted in the poster and if they had seen the Earth. The effect of choice of perspective was demonstrated by children who only talked about how the Earth could be seen from space. The need to relate different conceptual frameworks became apparent with children, who meant that the Earth was situated in the direction of the sky. Different understandings of the relevance of an explanation were detected when the interviewer talked from the perspective in the room, but children talked about the perspective in the present poster. The results indicate that not only both conceptual frameworks and understanding of perspectives play a part when students encounter questions related to the concept of Earth, but also the students' judgments of the relevance of different explanations in a situation.

Visual representations play an important role in science teaching. The way in which visual representations may help children to acquire scientific concepts is a crucial test in the debate between constructivist and socio-cultural oriented researchers. In this paper, the question is addressed as a problem of how to contextualize conceptions and explanations in cognitive frameworks and visual descriptions in cultural contexts. Eleven children aged 6-8 years were interviewed in the presence of a globe. Those children who expressed views of the Earth that deviated from the culturally accepted view did not show any difficulties in combining these different ideas with the globe model. The way that this is possible is explained using a model of conceptual development as a process of differentiation between contexts and frameworks. The child must differentiate not only between the Earth as an area of flat ground in a common-sense framework and the planet Earth in a theoretical framework, but also between these frameworks and the framework of the representation. It is suggested that a differentiation on a meta-level is needed to distinguish which problems and explanations belong to which cognitive framework. In addition, the children must contextualize the visual description of the Earth in the globe in a cultural context to discern which mode of representation is used.

The studies in this thesis explore children’s understanding of the earth when presented with visual representations. The conceptual understanding is related to cognitive contexts as well as the physical and cultural state. Pictures and models, as communicative tools, are associated with both cognition and culture. The investigation was divided into three different studies, where the main differentiation was the category of visual representation of the earth that was used. In the first study eleven children, aged six to eight, were interviewed with a globe as a model of the earth. In the second study fourteen children, aged six to eight, were interviewed, this time with a poster of a satellite photo of the earth. In the third study, eighteen children, aged six to nine, were interviewed while they were drawing pictures the earth. The results showed that the influence of these representations could be detected in what the children talked about and in their choices of explanations. In the children’s conceptions of the earth, however, no clear influence from the representations was apparent. A possible explanation for this is that pictures and models can be produced according to different conventions for depicting. The alternative modes of depiction in the children’s culture appeared to make it possible for the children to choose a certain mode of depiction, in their interpretation of the representation that made this interpretation in accord with their own conception of the earth. Not only did the children express various conceptions of the earth, e.g. that people and countries were situated inside a globe, in the presence of the representations, but also some children drew pictures of the earth in line with conventional methods for depicting the earth, even though they may have expressed alternative conceptions. The results support the view that children hold conceptions, but they oppose to claims that naïve thinking is without conceptual structure, and that we have no foundation to locate conceptions in people’s minds, as distinguished from concepts that are located in cultural tools.

The contemporary debate regarding the question of conceptual change relates to the learning paradox in Plato’s dialogue Menon, where Menon asks how it is possible to engage in a search for knowledge of something entirely new. How is it possible to change from a commonsense view of a phenomenon into a scientific one that also sometimes goes quite contrary to the commonsense view? Sociocultural analysis dispatch the question by talking of situated cognition and by that ignoring individual cognitions. Constructivist approaches describes cognitive development as an evolution from simple naïve models of a phenomenon to more complex and powerful models, often by implying that the simple models are abandoned in favour of the new ones. Here, another model for conceptual development and conceptual change will be advanced. It is proposed that conceptual development and conceptual change is constituted by a process of a continuous assimilation of new information into an all-embracing model and, simultaneously, a differentiation within this compounded model resulting eventually in different new models. This description that stick to the Piagetian way of describing cognitive development, will be illustrated by means of empirical data from a study of children’s conceptions of the shape of the earth.