A Stimulus-Response Model for Explaining When Students Decide to Engage in a Science Task: Developing the TSMS Model Through Physics

Abstract

Science education research shows that students' reasoning can be shaped by contextual embedding, salient task cues, and interactions among cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and motivational processes. Yet how these processes interact in the predecisional phase of task processing, when students first interpret a task and decide how to engage, remains undertheorised. To address this gap, we introduce the Task-Specific Motivational Stimulus (TSMS) model, a theoretical account of students' early disciplinary engagement with science tasks developed through physics as a prototypical case. Drawing on expectancy-value theories, heuristic-analytic and metacognitive accounts of reasoning, and physics education research on task representation and resources-based reasoning, the model proposes that task cues trigger initial task typification through heuristic knowledge activation and integration, resulting in a potentially misleading first impression mental model of the task type. Accompanying metacognitive feelings of rightness and difficulty shape task-related self-efficacy, value, and perceived cost. These evaluations are integrated into a task-specific motivational stimulus, the motivationally informed judgement of solvability, which is assumed to influence the probability that students engage in disciplinary analytic reasoning to build a task representation or rely on unexamined initial interpretations. We justify the model's assumptions, specify and formalise it for physics tasks, derive testable hypotheses for future empirical validation, and discuss how it can organise physics education findings through a common explanatory mechanism. Although developed through physics, the TSMS model is proposed as a theoretical framework for investigating an empirically underexplored decision process underlying early engagement with science tasks that share similar characteristics.