Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a theory of how to enable people to understand how physical systems work Two key hypotheses have emerged from our research. The first is that in order to understand a physical system, students need to acquire causal mental models for how the system works. Further, it is not enough to have just a single mental model. Students need alternative mental models that represent the systems behavior from different, but coordinated, perspectives, such as at the macroscopic and microscopic levels.The second hypothesis is that in order to make causal understanding feasible in the initial stages of learning, students have to be introduced to simplified models. These models then get gradually refined into more sophisticated mental models. W e will present a theory outlining (1) the properties of an easily learnable, coherent set of initial models, and (2) the types of evolutions needed for students to acquire a more powerful set of models with broad utility.