Enrico Fermi Summer School in Physics, Course CLVI (Italian Physical Society, 2004) The Variability of Student Reasoning, Lecture 3: Manifold Cognitive Resources

The previous lectures focused on phenomenology: What sorts of occurrences do we see in students’ reasoning? This third and final lecture focuses on ontology: What sorts of things do we attribute to students ’ minds? It has become conventional to speak and think in terms of conceptions, naïve theories, and stages of development. These are all attributions of stable properties, and they account well for patterns that can occur in student reasoning. They do not account well, however, for the variability and multiple patterns illustrated in the previous lectures. Research in cognitive science provides an alternative ontology of multiple, fine-grained cognitive resources that are context-sensitive in their activation. This lecture reviews some of that work and draws implications for elementary science education.