New Book Chapter in International Handbook, March 2012

A. Lynn Stephens and John J. Clement are proud to announce the publication of a chapter in the Second International Handbook of Science Education (Springer), Chapter 13: The role of thought experiments in science and science learning.

In this chapter, we review selected studies of thought experiments used by both experts and students and attempt to develop some useful definitions and conceptual distinctions. We then apply these in an analysis of a classroom episode as an example of the roles thought experiments can play in productive whole class discussions. We are interested in this area because thought experiments are one example of the kinds of creative reasoning of which experts and students appear to be capable of under the right conditions.