Overall, these empirical results on student’s mental elaborations, as seen
in Table V, strongly reveals that students could form meaningful scientific
understanding by integrating scientific knowledge obtained from the CA-SIM
learning environments into their existing knowledge framework. It also reveals
how misconceptions in existing knowledge can get intermingled with incoming
information to form ‘synthetic conceptions’ (15, 109) that are discussed in the
following section.is higher viscosity’ to connect new-coming information from CA-SIM to his
existing knowledge