This paper presents the design and initial learning research with the MMM modeling platform, seeking to advance middle school students' learning through constructing computational models of complex physical and chemical systems. A complexity-based structure of an MMM interface is introduced. It suggests that a complex system can be described and…

Mental models are representations of students' minds concepts to explain a situation or an on-going process. The purpose of this study is to describe students' mental model in solving mathematical patterns of generalization problem. Subjects in this study were the VII grade students of junior high school in Situbondo, East Java, Indonesia. This…

A primary goal of instruction is to prepare learners to transfer their knowledge and skills to new contexts, but how far this transfer goes is an open question. In the research reported here, we seek to explain a case of transfer through examining the processes by which a conceptual representation used to reason about complex systems was…