The Epistemic Generativity of Using a Model of a Big Idea

ABSTRACT Science instruction should involve learners in generating and warranting ideas, what we call epistemic generation. In modeling instruction, epistemic generation should be achieved by coordinating a model structure with the experienced world in reciprocal directions denoted as developing models and using models. In the former, a model structure is shaped from experience. In the latter, experience is shaped by a model structure. Focusing on this latter direction, the present study combats the perception that using models is not a generative practice but merely the dutiful application of others' ideas. Featuring an energy model as an example, the article explains, and illustrates with qualitative evidence, how the model supported epistemic generation by ninth‐grade students using it to analyze and explain the biological process of aerobic cellular respiration. Because the model represented energy, a big idea governing the domain of cellular respiration, it also incorporated three characteristics attributable to big ideas that contributed to its generativity: abstraction; mechanistic meaning, and representational efficiency. Presenting cases of small‐group work, the article traces how epistemic generativity was supported by the energy model's structure, general affordances of models, and these three characteristics.