ABSTRACT
Middle and high school students encounter numerous scientific and “everyday” processes in their curriculum. This chapter provides a conceptual analysis that explains why there is a barrier in understanding these processes and what can be done to overcome it. The analysis essentially suggests that these often-misunderstood concepts are bi-level processes in which the global level pattern emerges from the collective individual actions/interactions at the micro level. Two types of features of the underlying explanatory mechanisms of emergent causal and direct causal processes are identified. One type of feature describes the nature of the behavior of the individuals at the micro level. The second set of five features describes the relationship between the micro and the macro levels. These bi-level relational features are the ones that students can appeal to in explaining the causal relationship between the levels.
