The purpose of this study is to explore evaluation criteria that pre-service elementary teachers employ as they evaluate and select models to explain electric circuits. Thirty junior students in a university of education have participated in the study as a part of the science education course in which they were enrolled. The lessons for the participants have been organized as a cyclic sequence of different modeling pedagogies including the expressive, experimental, and evaluative modeling. The pre-service teachers have been given five electric circuits in order and asked to create models and further develop them through peer discussion. Their modeling activities have been video- or audio-recorded, and the recordings and their transcripts have been analyzed using a framework of model evaluation criteria. It reveals that the types and frequencies of evaluation criteria used are different between situations of model development and model selection. While empirical and theoretical criteria have been used dominantly in both situations, more various criteria have been employed in the situation where the pre-service teachers selected one model among alternatives. Implications for science education and science education research have been suggested.