Leveraging Fourth and Sixth Graders’ Experiences to Reveal Understanding of the Forms and Features of Distributed Causality

Abstract

Research has focused on students’ difficulties understanding phenomena in which agency is distributed across actors whose individual-level behaviors converge to result in collective outcomes. Building on Levy and Wilensky (2008 Levy, S. T., & Wilensky, U. (2008). Inventing a "mid-level" to make ends meet: Reasoning through the levels of complexity. Cognition & Instruction, 26(1), 1–47. [Google Scholar]), this study identified features of distributed causality students understand and that may offer affordances for instruction. Students displayed more distributed reasoning than anticipated, used hybrid and flexible reasoning, and reasoned about additive effects of collections of agents and their interactions, even when intent was unaligned.