  The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows,
on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high
performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to
understand plausible ways on which the brain processes scientific information
so that scientific thinking skills could be taught more effectively. As physics
is a subject in which mathematical and conceptual reasoning can not be
separated, instructors of physics face the problem of finding suitable advise
on the most effective methods of teaching physics (i.e. how much time should be
spent on intuitive conceptual reasoning and how much time in developing
quantitative reasoning, and how to teach both in a unitary way). In spite the
important efforts made by the PER community, the published results are
overwhelming and confusing for the physics instructors in the sense that the
conclusions that have arisen in those articles are in some instances
controversial and far from being conclusive in pointing out a particular
strategy to overcome the afore mentioned problem. Accordingly, based on the
analysis of published PER work, we'll be arguing that one of the major
difficulties to overcome in the teaching of physics could be associated to the
lack of a consistent and coherent methodological framework for teaching which
integrates both aspects, conceptual and mathematical reasoning, in a systemic
way of thinking. We will be presenting a set of plausible steps that could be
applied to tackle the aforementioned difficulty.
