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 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'…

Analogical models can be powerful aids to reasoning, as when light is explained in terms of water waves; or they can be misleading, as when chemical processes are thought of in terms of life processes such as putrefaction. This paper proposes a structural characterization of good science analogy using a theoretical approach in which complex…