Salience of representations and analogies in physics

This paper focuses on the dynamics as students reason using analogies. We describe analogical scaffolding, a model of cognitive processes by which students can use prior knowledge to learn new material, and apply this model to demonstrate its utility in describing the dynamics of student reasoning about EM waves in an interview. The present fine-grained analysis confirms prior large-scale findings, that representations play a key role in student use of analogy.