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This paper presents a revised analysis method for studies of students' conceptual understanding and conceptual change. The method emphasizes the roles of discussion and co-interpretation between two researchers with differing degrees of expertise in the content area under investigation. By organizing the analysis around the relative "novice's" learning, important insights can be gained into student reasoning. This method draws heavily from existing literature on conceptual change theories and methods. Increased use of our method could enrich engineering education research by encouraging more nuanced and informative characterizations of student conceptual understanding and the processes, triggers and obstacles of conceptual change.
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Montfort et al. (2020) studied this question.