Many academic concepts require students to change their prior knowledge—or undergo ‘conceptual changes’—to understand and master them, in sciences, mathematics, social sciences, and language learning. Conceptual change (CC) research is therefore crucial for education. However, research on educational designs that foster CCs remains underdeveloped, and the field is divided among competing learning theories with corresponding educational recommendations, including A. diSessa’s knowledge-in-pieces theory, M. Chi’s ontological shift theory, and S. Vosniadou’s framework theory.

I present a fourth promising alternative: developmental education, or ‘(Neo-) Vygotskian’ educational approaches. Moreover, I delineate key complementarities between developmental education and CC research, aiming to improve both the theories and educational practices for fostering CCs and, more broadly, academic knowledge learning.

These complementarities were identified through a comparative multi-level analysis, which delineates the main epistemological assumptions underlying learning theories, how these assumptions inform distinct educational principles, and how these principles, in turn, inform specific educational methods and practices.