Analyzing the Use of Teaching Strategies in a Model Based Curriculum: Promoting Expert Reasoning and Imagery Enhancement in High School Students1

We wish to document the use of important teaching strategies and to cast them in a form that will optimize their usefulness for teachers and curriculum developers. From expert think-aloud protocols, we have identified a number of strategies for evaluating and modifying explanatory mental models. Analyzing a model-based high school science curriculum to see whether this set of strategies might apply, we document the use of analogies, extreme cases, running explanatory models, and Gedanken experiments, and the implicit use of many expert imagery enhancement strategies. Our overall purpose is to refine concepts developed from expert protocols and to create new terminology for understanding implicit strategies at work in lesson structures. Case studies of corresponding classroom tapes provide initial exemplars indicating that when the strategies are suggested in a curriculum and presented in a way that maximizes their imagistic potential, students can use the expert thinking strategies as part of their learning process.