@emc2andallthat @sstoneb One thing that I learned is that you have to account for the varying levels of ability with respect to concrete vs. formal reasoning. I *love* me a nice crisp circuit diagram, too, but there’s an added level of abstraction that some kids in high school will struggle with.

I saw this with circuit diagrams, ray diagrams, and kinetics graphs of any sort. I had kids who could produce beautiful, 100%-correct ray diagrams for an image formed by a converging lens (for example), but if you asked them something simple about it, like “If you look from <this location> what would you see?” or “Where does your eye have to be to see this image?” you find that they haven’t a clue. They’re just blindly (no pun intended, but now that I’ve said it, ha) following the rules for constructing the diagram. I changed how I teach about images after that.