Developing formal thinking and building conceptual knowledge as a background for formal interpretation of phenomena is one
of the main challenges in teaching and learning physics. In the context of the experimental exploration of the electromagnetic
phenomena, pupils’ conceptual referents and representations of the phenomena and their identification and exploration of
conditions to produce electro-magnetic interactions are investigated through semi-structured interview in the framework of
Conceptual Laboratories of Operative Exploration. The pupils construct global interpretations of phenomena starting from local
interpretations of the single experiments and synthetizing them by means of building the formal abstract entities.
