  Researchers working within knowledge-in-pieces traditions have often employed
observational approaches to investigate micro-processes of learning. There is
growing evidence from this line of work that students' intuitive thinking about
physical phenomena is characterized more so by its diversity and flexibility
than its uniformity and robustness. This characterization implies that much of
the dynamics of students' thinking over short timescales involve processes that
stabilize local patterns of thinking, later destabilize them, and allow other
patterns to form. This kind of "change" may only involve dynamics by which the
system of intuitive knowledge settles into various states without changing the
system structure itself. I describe a case study in which a group of college
students shift their thinking about motion several times during a collaborative
learning activity. Instead of focusing on micro-processes of change, I describe
these dynamics in terms of mechanisms that contribute to local stability of
students' conceptual coherences.
