Why Don't They Understand Us?

The aim of the article is to provide teachers some ideas about thedevelopment of physical knowledge and to make them more receptive to thedifferences between their and the students thinking. I want to show, thatthese differences lie not only in the richness of experience, but also in thestructure of this experience. I try to point to some of these differenceslying in the content, form and meaningfulness. The article is based on anadapted version of Piaget's model of the growth of physical knowledge. Themodel represents the changes of semantic understanding, formal language andlogical structure of a theory during its historical development. I illustratethe model on the development of classical mechanics, but similar changes canbe found also in the history of electrodynamics or quantum mechanics. Thecentral idea of the paper is to use this model of the historical developmentof physical knowledge in analysis of the cognitive processes in physicseducation.