Big ideas in science education are meant to be interpretive frameworks that empower student learning. Unfortunately, outside of the broad conception of scientific evaluation, there are few theoretical explanations of how this might happen. Therefore, we contribute one such explanation, an instructional concept called integrative analysis wherein students use a big idea to interconnect isolated scenarios and enrich their meanings. We illustrate the characteristics and value of integrative analysis within an empirical study of student learning in 9th-grade biology. The study focused on using energy transfer as a big idea for teaching cellular respiration. Fifty-nine students were randomly assigned to one of two instructional conditions. In the “analysis” condition, students processed a set of three manipulatives representing cellular respiration molecules; then, they abstracted the deep energy transfer structure of these manipulatives as a big idea. In the “recognition” condition, students processed the same molecule-manipulatives, but without energy interpretations. Instead, they constructed additional manipulatives using novel materials. Then, students in both conditions received an identical lesson where they used their knowledge of the manipulatives to learn about one cellular respiration process, glycolysis. Specifically, students processed a sequence of three texts describing glycolysis, annotating the texts with either their deep energy transfer structure (analysis condition) or their contextualized knowledge of the manipulatives (recognition condition). A posttest showed that in the analysis condition, this process was significantly integrative as evidenced by analysis students’ advantage over recognition students in connecting glycolysis to novel phenomena and generating causal explanations about glycolysis.

科学教育中的重要思想旨在成为赋予学生学习能力的解释框架。不幸的是，除了科学评估的广泛概念之外，几乎没有关于这可能如何发生的理论解释。因此，我们提供了一个这样的解释，一种称为综合分析的教学概念，其中学生使用一个大想法来连接孤立的场景并丰富他们的意义。我们在 9 年级生物学学生学习的实证研究中说明了综合分析的特征和价值。该研究的重点是将能量转移作为教授细胞呼吸的重要思想。五十九名学生被随机分配到两种教学条件之一。在“分析”条件下，学生处理了一组代表细胞呼吸分子的三个操作；然后，他们将这些操纵装置的深层能量传输结构抽象为一个伟大的想法。在“识别”条件下，学生处理相同的分子操作，但没有能量解释。相反，他们使用新材料构建了额外的操作装置。然后，两种情况下的学生都接受了相同的课程，他们利用自己的操作知识来了解一种细胞呼吸过程，即糖酵解。具体来说，学生们处理了一系列描述糖酵解的三篇文本，用它们的深层能量转移结构（分析条件）或他们对操作的情境化知识（识别条件）对文本进行注释。