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Background: Even infants can recognize whether patterns of motion are or are not natural, yet an acknowledged challenge for science education is to promote adequate reasoning about such patterns. Since research indicates linkage between the conceptual bases of recognition and reasoning, it seems possible that recognition can be engaged to support reasoning.Purpose: Noting the theoretical and practical significance of showing that recognition can support reasoning, the reported research aimed to examine the possibility in relation to horizontal motion.Sample: The research was conducted with 167 children (mean age = 9.51 years) from Years 4, 5 and 6 of an English-medium school located in Lisbon, Portugal.Design and methods: Individual pre-tests were administered to all participants to assess initial reasoning about the direction and speed with which rolling balls travel after collision. Reasoning was assessed in the sense of both predicting and explaining. Thereafter, about two-thirds of the sample ...

International audience; When students reason during school science, they often refer to conceptions that are derived from out-of-school experiences and are poor proxies for science orthodoxy. However, for some areas of science, these conceptions represent only a proportion of students' full conceptual knowledge, for tacit understanding exists that is superior to the understanding displayed when reasoning. Noting that tacit understanding is engaged when events are judged as natural or non-natural, the paper is concerned with software that: a) requires the direction and speed of falling objects to be predicted, i.e. a typical science reasoning task that engages conceptual knowledge; b) presents simulations of predicted motion in the expectation that its naturalness or non-naturalness would be recognised. An evaluation study is reported where children aged 8 to 12 years worked with the software in contexts that typify computer use in classrooms, i.e. individually under adult guidance (n = 44 children) or in pairs with a classmate (n = 48 children). They were observed while they did this. Reasoning about object fall was assessed via change from individual pre-tests administered prior to software usage to individual post-tests administered a few weeks afterwards. The children who worked with the software showed greater pre- to post-test gains in conceptual understanding than control children (n = 47 children), who lacked software experience. The gains were especially marked for the children who worked in pairs. The approach taken is contrasted with traditional approaches to conceptual change in school science, e.g. strategies that rely upon classroom experiments.