Diverse implicit cognitive elements seem to support but also constrain reasoning in different domains. Many of these cognitive constraints can be thought of as either implicit assumptions about the nature of things or reasoning heuristics for decision-making. In this study we applied this framework to investigate college students' understanding of…

In this study we explore the strategies that undergraduate and graduate chemistry students use when engaged in classification tasks involving symbolic and microscopic (particulate) representations of different chemical reactions. We were specifically interested in characterizing the basic features to which students pay attention when classifying…