#511: Making Theory Visible: A Visual Model for Resource Theory and Mechanistic Reasoning

Understanding conceptual change requires examining how students activate and coordinate cognitive resources while reasoning about a task. Resource Theory (RT) describes how reasoning emerges from the activation and coordination of fine-grained cognitive resources in context, while Mechanistic Reasoning (MR) characterizes how students construct causal explanations by identifying entities, their properties, and their activities. In this paper, we propose a visual model that brings these frameworks together to illustrate how framing, resource activation, and coordination interact during problem solving. The model serves as an analytic tool for tracing how different configurations of these processes can lead to productive mechanistic explanations or to more superficial reasoning.