THEORY INTO PRACTICE/Autumn 2001 Teaching as Persuasion global warming; religious doctrines) or historically important ideas that are no longer widely believed (eg, Greek mythology; the ancient scientific theory that matter is made of earth, water, fire, and air). In contrast, researchers and teachers typically fail to distinguish between belief and knowledge when students learn uncontroversial topics that are widely accepted as correct or factual (eg, the structure of the cell, the main events in the American Civil War). And yet the distinction is equally important in such situations. Although experts may both understand and believe these ideas, students often do not, and this has important consequences for learning, instruction, and assessment.

For these uncontroversial topics (which dominate the curriculum), learning is typically conceptualized as “knowledge acquisition” or “knowledge building”(eg, Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Carey, 1991). Students are often viewed as constructing a single knowledge structure; they are either tacitly assumed to believe this knowledge structure, or belief is ignored altogether. By contrast, when we distinguish between understanding and belief, we assume that students learning a new topic in school may construct at least two separate conceptual structures. One structure is their understanding of the ideas they are being taught; the other structure is the set of ideas that they themselves believe. In making this assumption, we are drawing on ideas of 20th-century philosophy and applying them to education (Alcoff, 1998). To illustrate the importance of making the distinction between understanding and belief, we present a hypothetical example (but one based on our research programs) of a middle-school teacher who has just given her students a formative assessment of their basic understanding of molecules. The teacher implicitly conceptualizes the learning process as students constr ucting single knowledge structures; she is not thinking in terms of understanding and belief. The teacher, however, has a good grasp of the kinds of questions that are needed to uncover students’ conceptions of matter. We will consider just a few of her questions.