Leveraging dual-process theories of reasoning to understand and support student reasoning

Introductory physics courses aim to improve students' problem-solving and reasoning skills. To aid in attaining this goal, researchers in physics education have studied students' qualitative inferential reasoning to develop and refine theoretical frameworks for how students reason through qualitative physics problems. Recently, researchers have begun to apply dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR), from cognitive science and psychology, to support mechanistic predictions of student reasoning in physics. This talk will briefly explore the history of frameworks for student qualitative inferential reasoning in PER and how DPToR is impacting the current work of understanding how our students reason. Then, the [JS1] talk will discuss our work leveraging DPToR to improve the teaching and learning of physics. In specific, I will report on recent studies employing the reasoning chain construction task -- in which students respond to a physics question by drawing from a list of reasoning elements (all of which are true) in order to assemble a chain of reasoning that leads to a conclusion – to investigate reasoning phenomenon related to DPToR.