The interpretative framework used to make sense of the students’ responses considered deep conceptual understanding of each situation and a scoring rubric (Table 1) that focused on an appropriate conclusion, the conceptual relevance, the quality of evidence, and sufficiency of the reasoning (Sampson et al., 2011). Student responses to each problem situation and subtask were scored according to a four-step (i.e. correct or incorrect conclusion, relevant/partially relevant/irrelevant conceptual foundation, supportive/nonsupportive evidence, appropriate/partially ap- propriate/inappropriate reasoning) process to establish scores for the specific parts and total task resulting in 0 – 6 points. The following criteria were used to code the responses: