A careful re-reading of these debates over the covering-law model in history suggests that the debate took place largely because of the erroneous assumption of the unity of science and the postulation of the regulative logical similarity of all areas of scientific reasoning to a few clear examples of explanation in a few natural sciences.
Figure 4 shows examples of metaphoric explanations.
Some representative examples of students' explanations from all three grades are presented in Table 3.
Table 1 provides examples of student explanations from the corpus along with human-generated scoring patterns.
Examples of positive explanations are the following: 'Because I often can't see the usefulness of certain subjects'.
Hempel's conditions had many virtues, not least of which was that they appeared to fit many familiar examples of scientific explanations, such as explaining why a coin expanded when it was heated by invoking the law that copper expands when heated and noting that the coin was copper.
The authors conclude by offering examples of student explanations to highlight the utility of this cognitive model for designing assessment items that document students' progress toward expertise.
Examples of such explanations reported in other studies include poor personal hygiene related to environmental contamination and lack of water, an adverse physical environment that contributes to exposure to dust, dirt, and cold, and excessive physical labour and other strenuous activities.
Fig. 2 Examples of generated explanation Fig. 3 Procedure of generating explanation of a model-making process.
Especially concerned with examples of theoretical explanation in the sciences, they proposed that the hallmark of explanation is the ability to treat from a single perspective phenomena previously seen as highly disparate.
