ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we describe some of the ways that models and modeling provide a unifying theme that is useful for integrating many of the most relevant research traditions in order to gain insight into the growth of student learning. We then share an example of students’ developing models while engaged in a model-eliciting task. We have found that the multiple cycles of increasing stability and sophistication that students go through in developing solutions to model-eliciting problems prove to be very valuable forms of information about the growth of student thinking. We conclude by describing how modeling highlights some new issues and suggests some significant changes in direction for traditional lines of research.
