Research in undergraduate physics and in K-12 science education has demonstrated challenges and successes in facilitating student engagement with reasoning practices associated with professional physicists. Here we focus on one important dimension of physics reasoning, using evidence to revise models. While this topic has been explored at the…

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…

Learning progressions (LPs) are novel models for the development of assessments in science education, that often use a scale to categorize students' levels of reasoning. Pictorial representations are important in chemistry teaching and learning, and also in LPs, but the differences between pictorial and verbal items in chemistry LPs is unclear. In…

A characterization of the modelling process in science is proposed for science education, based on Mario Bunge's ideas about the construction of models in science. Galileo's "Dialogues" are analysed as a potentially fruitful starting point to implement strategies aimed at modelling in the classroom in the light of that proposal. It is…

This particular study is part of a research programme on the difficulties encountered by students when learning about wave phenomena in a three-dimensional medium in the absence or presence of obstacles. It focuses on how students reason in situations in which wave optics need to be used: diffraction of light by an aperture, imaging in the…

While many researchers in science education have argued that students' epistemological understanding of models and of modelling processes would influence their cognitive processing on a modelling task, there has been little direct evidence for such an effect. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relation between students' epistemological…

Attempts to show that not only can density be taught to lower ability pupils but that by doing so, there is the possibility of assisting pupils to develop their reasoning powers. Lists teaching activities that help in this process. (CW)