ABSTRACT
The central goal of this chapter is to describe six principles that have proven to be especially
useful to help researchers (or teachers, curriculum designers, or assessment specialists) create
thought revealing activities that we refer to as model-eliciting activities. The first section describes general characteristics and purposes of model-eliciting activities. The second section
gives examples of several model-eliciting activities, and it also describes typical solutions that
students generate to such problems. The third section states several disclaimers about model-
eliciting activities, which tend to cause confusion if they are not addressed early. The fourth
section describes difficulties that model-eliciting activities were designed to address in research;
and, the fifth section describes principles for designing productive model-eliciting activities.
