We help teachers create modeling activities that require students to use their knowledge of causal dependencies to construct explanatory models, derive empirically testable hypotheses from these models, and design experiments to test these hypotheses. Engagement in activities like these have been shown to promote greater depth of scientific understanding in college students (e.g. Clement, 2009).

Scientific explanations enhance understanding by identifying causal dependencies that connect target phenomena to sets of antecedent and background conditions (Strevens, 2008). Proficiency in using this kind of relational knowledge can enhance students’ ability to derive and test hypotheses about what happens when things change and what happens when things change in certain ways (Woodward, 2003).

The more and wider variety of inferences one can make the deeper one’s understanding is (Ylikoski, 2009). The recommended strategies for performing these tasks are designed to guide students’ use of causal knowledge to construct and test explanatory models in ways that comply with the practices of specific frameworks in psychology, like behavioral, cognitive, or physiological. The core concepts include material about the nature of scientific explanations and how scientists use modeling strategies and self-generated diagrams to facilitate reasoning about phenomena.