Representations of the human circulatory system

There is no agreement about the robustness of intuitive representations of the circulatory system and their susceptibility to change by instruction. In this paper, we analyse to what extent students with varying degrees of biology instruction and different ages (High School Health Science and Social Science students and first and final year University Psychology students) have been able to change their intuitive beliefs into scientific representations of the workings of the human circulatory system. We analysed two aspects of the representation of the circulatory system: models of the circulatory system (the relationship between the heart and lungs in the blood pathway) and the circulatory system pattern (the blood pathway between organs). In relation to the models of the circulatory system, we found differences among the different groups of students according to the amount of biological instruction they had. The majority of participants (High School Social Science students and both University Psychology student groups) had an incomplete model, which did not include the lungs while the High School Health Science students group had a scientific representation. As for the circulatory system pattern, we did not find differences among groups. However, we cannot conclude that the representations of the two aspects of the circulatory system (model and pattern) are independent. The data in this study show that compulsory human physiology instruction did not enhance the acquisition of a scientific representation of the human circulatory system.