Students at the junior high school (JHS) level often cannot use their knowledge of physics for explaining and predicting phenomena. We claim that this difficulty stems from the fact that explanations are multi-step reasoning tasks, and students often lack the qualitative problem-solving strategies needed to guide them. This article describes a new…

Reports long-term effects of intensive instruction in the cue attendance or hypothesis generation on open-exploration behavior of 120 ninth graders. Five dependent measures included: number of observed details; number and quality of hypotheses; and number and diversity of questions. Results suggest long-term benefits. (Author/JN)