Chapter 13: A Case For the Model-Based Reasoning Classroom

As human beings, we are driven to make sense of the world around us. This sense-making endeavor takes on different forms for different purposes, but it is ultimately about seeking patterns, predicting what might happen next, and explaining why certain things happen. This drive is one that humans are born with and it is what makes us such amazing learning machines in early childhood (Gopnick et al., 1999). Too often, unfortunately, school experiences squander rather than capitalize on this innate drive. However, science provides an ideal venue to take advantage of these reasoning patterns and inclinations for sensemaking as the progress of science is much like the sensemaking children do. Children, like scientists, use what they know to build new knowledge; they revise and extend their knowledge as new information becomes available. This fundamental aspect of science, that it builds on and extends what came before, is central to understanding and reasoning in this field (Nersessian, 2008). Merely telling students what they should memorize about particular ideas and/or concepts is, at the core, a violation of what science is all about and deprives students of key opportunities to harness their innate sensemaking drive. Instead, students should experience something in the world that is worth their time to figure out, a phenomenon or class of phenomena that is recognizable from the real world. Students should be steeped in potential explanatory ideas and develop and refine their own ideas that can be used to make sense of phenomena. Ideally, students should then be placed in a context in which ideas need to be expanded upon or revised based on new evidence. In sum, they should be asked to make inferences from prior knowledge and evidence to figure out how aspects of the natural and designed world operate.