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Cited by 458

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 70 of the 70 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Conceptual and Epistemic Aspects of Students' Scientific Explanations

Sandoval, William A.·2003·Journal of the Learning Sciences
DOI 10.1207/s15327809jls1201_2
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Abstract

This article explores how students' epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain, as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-supported curriculum about evolution. Analyses intended to disentangle conceptual and epistemic aspects of explanation reveal that groups sought plausible causal accounts of observed data, and were sensitive to the need for causal coherence, while articulating explanations consistent with the theory of natural selection. Groups often failed to explicitly cite data to support key claims, however, both because of difficulty in interpreting data and because they did not seem to see explicit evidence as crucial to an explanation. These findings reveal that students have productive epistemic resources to bring to bear during inquiry, but highlight the need for an epistemic discourse around student-generated artifacts to deepen both the conceptual and epistemological understanding students may develop through inquiry.

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Metadata

Authors
Sandoval, W. A.
Venue
Journal of the Learning Sciences
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2003-01
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
5-51
ISSN
  • 1050-8406 (ISSN-L)
  • 1532-7809
DOI
10.1207/s15327809jls1201_2
OpenAlex
W2128542449
Cited by
458
References
70
FWCI
92.81
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Conceptual and Epistemic Aspects of Students' Scientific Explanations. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1207/s15327809jls1201_2
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Sandoval, W. A. (2003). Conceptual and Epistemic Aspects of Students' Scientific Explanations. Journal of the Learning Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls1201_2

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.