The design of innovative didactic sequence on a specific topic requires, in the Model of Educational Reconstruction perspective, besides the conceptual contents reconstruction, knowledge of students' conceptions about the topic focused. Conceptual Laboratories of Operative Exploration (CLOE) were designed with the goal of gaining direct knowledge on how students, particularly younger children (kinder-garden, primary, middle school), approach to specific topics and to the operative proposals, through which the innovative educational proposals are developed. CLOE lab involves pupils to discuss everyday life scenarios, recover their everyday and sensorial knowledge, explore experimental situations by means of Inquiry-Based Learning strategies. The informal learning environment of a CLOE session is an ideal format also for research focused on students’ ideas and reasoning patterns, how they build formal thinking, develop interpretative representations, construct models on phenomena, reinterpret everyday knowledge. The research design characteristics of the CLOE labs are presented, exemplifying it, in the case of sound in primary
