Characterizing chemistry students causal reasoning when building a weitten explanations of a natural phenomenon

Abstract

Studies about the nature of scientific explanations and students' ability to generate them are diverse. Some authors have focused on the structure of these explanations (Tang, 2016); others have paid attention to the different functions that explanations serve (Gilbert et al., 2000) or to the types of causal relationships that are established within them (Grotzer, 2003). These different studies emphasize the importance of developing students' explanatory abilities but uncover the many challenges that have to be faced to do it. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in better characterizing and fostering students' ability to generate causal mechanistic explanations (Russ et al., 2008). These types of explanations are a hallmark of scientific reasoning and students are expected to generate them using normative concepts and ideas (NRC, 2013). In this paper, we present the results of a study in which different frameworks for the characterization of mechanistic reasoning were integrated and adapted to analyze students' written explanations in a secondary school chemistry class. Our goal is to illustrate how our approach can be applied to identify and characterize different levels of expressed causal reasoning in students' explanations.