The core idea here is that students of all ages have a rich variety of cognitive resources for reasoning about the physical world, resources they use in different ways depending on the circumstances. We're interested to understand how students extend and refine these resources and how they use them. For instance, when students fail to use productive common-sense ideas in science classes, it is often because they (tacitly) believe that science class is not an appropriate place to use common sense. A key feature of this project is to study students of all ages in order to answer these basic questions: Which cognitive abilities and approaches to learning that we see in successful older students (in college and graduate school) can we also find the seeds of even in elementary school students? How can those productive seeds be developed? For instance, reasoning with analogies turns out to be helpful for college physics students, though they often resist doing it; but elementary school students spontaneously generate analogies as part of their reasoning and explanations. (See a summary of Leslie Atkins' dissertation work for more details.) How can teachers and learning environments develop rather than squelch that productive habit of mind?
A New Conceptualization of What Constitutes Progress in Learning Physics, K-16
First-grade students displaying the seeds of mechanistic reasoning during a discussion of falling objects