Research in student knowledge and learning of science has typically focused on explaining conceptual change. Recent research, however, documents the great degree to which student thinking is dynamic and context-sensitive, implicitly calling for expla
nations not only of change but also of stability. In other words: When a pattern of student reasoning is sustained in specific moments and settings, what mechanisms contribute to sustaining it? We characterize student understanding and behavior in terms of multiple local coherences in that they may be variable yet still exhibit local stabilities. We attribute stability in local conceptual coherences to real-time activities that sustain these coherences. For example, particular conceptual understandings may be stabilized by the linguistic features of a worksheet question, or by feedback from the students spatial arrangement and orientation. We document a group of university students who engage in multiple local conceptual coherences while thinking about motion during a collaborative learning activity. As the students shift their thinking several times, we describe mechanisms that may contribute to local stability of their reasoning and behavior.
Common research tasks ask students to identify a correct answer and justify their answer choice. We propose expanding the array of research tasks to access different knowledge that students might have. By asking students to discuss answers they may n
ot have chosen naturally, we can investigate students abilities to explain something that is already established or to disprove an incorrect response. The results of these research tasks also provide us with information about how students responses vary across the different tasks. We discuss three underused question types, their possible benefits and some preliminary results from an electric circuits pretest utilizing these new question types. We find that the answer students most commonly choose as correct is the same choice most commonly eliminated as incorrect. Also, students given the correct answer can provide valuable reasoning to explain it, but they do not spontaneously identify it as the correct answer.
Researchers working within knowledge-in-pieces traditions have often employed observational approaches to investigate micro-processes of learning. There is growing evidence from this line of work that students intuitive thinking about physical phenom
ena is characterized more so by its diversity and flexibility than its uniformity and robustness. This characterization implies that much of the dynamics of students thinking over short timescales involve processes that stabilize local patterns of thinking, later destabilize them, and allow other patterns to form. This kind of change may only involve dynamics by which the system of intuitive knowledge settles into various states without changing the system structure itself. I describe a case study in which a group of college students shift their thinking about motion several times during a collaborative learning activity. Instead of focusing on micro-processes of change, I describe these dynamics in terms of mechanisms that contribute to local stability of students conceptual coherences.
