Stimulating Students’ Mechanistic Reasoning in Science and Technology Education Through Emerging Technologies

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how emerging technologies have the potential to stimulate students’ mechanistic reasoning in science and technology. The work provides insight into the constituents of mechanistic reasoning and the accompanying challenges encountered by students to develop this important dimension of scientific and technological thinking and reasoning. As abstraction is ubiquitous in science and technology, concepts with varying degrees of abstraction (simple to complex and concrete to abstract) are used to explain phenomena. Developing mechanistic reasoning is challenging because students are required to progress through an increased level of sophistication in reasoning that entails using concepts with an increasing degree of abstraction when describing mechanisms for phenomena. Extended reality (XR) technologies, an umbrella term for augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) among other emerging technologies, have the potential to stimulate students’ mechanistic reasoning due to their ability to translate abstract objects and relations, typically represented in textual forms, into animated representations in a virtual environment. The three ‘realities’ differ on the reality-virtuality continuum as well as on the immersion and interaction spectra. Students’ level of psychological immersion and interaction is maximum with VR; thus, VR has the full potential to stimulate students’ mechanistic reasoning.KeywordsMechanistic reasoningEmerging technologiesAbstractionExtended realityAugmented realityMixed realityVirtual reality