Reasoning about mechanism is central to disciplined inquiry in science and engineering and should thus be one of the foundations of a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. In addition, mechanistic reasoning is one of the core competencies listed in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Engineering Concepts and…

Because reasoning about mechanism is critical to disciplined inquiry in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains, this study focuses on ways to support the development of this form of reasoning. This study attends to how mechanistic reasoning is constituted through mathematical description. This study draws upon Smith's…

Mechanistic reasoning is an epistemic practice central within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Although there has been some work on mechanistic reasoning in the research literature and standards documents, much of this work targets domain-general characterizations of mechanistic reasoning; this study provides…