Abstract
Understanding biosystems requires a variety of qualitative and quantitative tools of thought if it is to be adequately exploited in biological education. This article reports on part of an exploratory study which attempted to look at some qualitative reasoning tools. The investigation looked at how students' understanding of qualitative changes in simple biosystem models made use of a variety of reasoning strategies and how this affected the kinds of inferences that were made. Three important tools of thought were identified concerned with how students made assumptions or used conjectures, dealt with variable interactions, and attributed holistic properties to the system. These findings suggest that students' use of qualitative reasoning tools is not dependent on logical thinking as different strategies can utilize different operational contexts (such as probabilistic inter-state relations).
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