Abstract
In science learning, context is an important dimension of any scientific object or phenomenon, and context-dependent variations prove to be as critical for a deep understanding as are abstract concepts, laws or rules. Our hypothesis is that a context gap can be illuminating to highlight the respective general-particular aspects of an object or phenomenon. Furthermore, provoking a perturbation during the learning process to obtain the emergence of such an event could be a productive tutoring strategy. We introduce the emergence of context effects as a problem space, to be modeled in the system. We propose a model of the contextual dimension, associated with an analytical view of its modeling, based on a metaphor in physics.