At this point in our students’ cognitive development, high school students are expected to engage with tasks that require building abstract conceptions from observation data as well as engage with logical arguments of these abstract concepts. In the Ohm’s Law Activity, students did exactly this. Starting with observational data from physical circuit setups, students were able to observe voltage and current data by measuring circuit elements with a multimeter. But with this data, students extrapolated a much deeper abstract conception on Ohm’s Law—with the help of scaffolding in the form of graphs and table organizers. Students could reason the relationship between the voltage, current, and resistance; they could transition away from specific examples and towards pure mathematical relationship. Understanding these relationships allowed students to show a deeper level of reasoning: students could begin to understand how currents would increase or decrease depending on the relationship between both the total amount of voltage and the total amount of resistance in a circuit. The lesson slides also pushed students further into abstract operational thinking by asking questions on scenarios students had no prior physical experience with.

However, many students in the general physics class were not as mathematically comfortable graphing data and linear regressions. In order to design experiences to bridge this mathematics gap, students were grouped together with stronger mathematics students. The social support from these groups allowed lower achieving students to perform higher than they would have individually.