We report the common justifications that university physics and chemistry students use to reason about changes in the pressure of an ideal gas from a microscopic perspective, based on our analysis of written responses from more than one thousand students. We find that these justifications vary in the extent to which they are (a) mechanistic and (b) consistent with kinetic-molecular theory. We propose that these ideas could serve as the basis for instruction and curriculum development that attends to student thinking.
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