The literature on scientific modelling practices in science education has provided a fruitful discussion on how learners tend to view models vs. how and what they should think about them. One approach is to teach students that models are abstractions so that they do not view them as a copy of phenomena they represent. Although teaching students…

We present a framework designed to help categorize various sense making moves, allowing for greater specificity in describing and understanding student reasoning and also in the development of curriculum to support this reasoning. The framework disaggregates between the mechanisms of student reasoning (the cognitive "tool" that they are…

There is increasing recognition of the multimodal representational nature of science discovery practices and the roles of multiple and multimodal representations in students' meaning making in science (Lemke, 1998; Tytler, Prain, Hubber, & Waldrip, 2013; Tang, "International Journal of Science Education," 38(13), 2069-2095, 2016).…

One of the central goals of modern science and chemistry education is to develop students' abilities to understand complex phenomena, and productively engage in explanation, justification, and argumentation. To accomplish this goal, we should better characterise the types of reasoning that we expect students to master in the different scientific…

In this paper, we present a third-grade ecology learning environment that integrates two forms of modeling--embodied modeling and agent-based modeling (ABMs)--through the generation of mathematical representations that are common to both forms of modeling. The term "agent" in the context of ABMs indicates individual computational objects…

Conflicting explanations and unrelated information in science classrooms increase cognitive load and decrease efficiency in learning. This reduced efficiency ultimately limits one's ability to solve reasoning problems in the science. In reasoning, it is the ability of students to sift through and identify critical pieces of information that is of…

We propose two contrasting types of student decision-making based on social and cognitive psychology models of separate mental processes for problem solving. Informal decision-making uses intuitive reasoning and is subject to cognitive biases, whereas formal decision-making uses effortful, logical reasoning. We explored indicators of students'…

Opportunities to generate model-based explanations are crucial for elementary students, yet are rarely foregrounded in elementary science learning environments despite evidence that early learners can reason from models when provided with scaffolding. We used a quasi-experimental research design to investigate the comparative impact of a scaffold…