Analysis of Students’ Diagrams Explaining Scientific Phenomena
Citation
Source Title
ISSN
Faculty
School
Funding and Sponsorship
Remarks
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Research in Science Education. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-021-10004-y.
Collection
Abstract
While there has been much interest in the power of student-generated multiple representations to promote student reasoning and conceptual understanding, most studies of student explanations have been of written artefacts or only included diagrams as an adjunct to written explanations. This approach may be because teachers do not have an accessible framework with which to evaluate students’ diagrams as being explanations. Adapting de Andrade et al.’s Research in Science Education, 49, 787-807 (2019) evaluation framework for written explanations, this study explored the benefits and limitations of a framework to evaluate students’ explanatory diagrams. Seventeen grade 5 and 6 students produced a series of explanatory diagrams over six chemistry lessons on particle theory. Their diagrams were coded and evaluated using the proposed diagram analysis framework. Some sample diagrams are included to illustrate how the framework assisted the evaluation of students’ diagrams. The framework helped identify key features of students’ diagrams and evaluate their explanatory powers consistently and effectively. This research also indicates that a series of stand-alone diagrams can effectively be used by teachers to assess how students communicate their understanding of causal explanations in terms of sub-microscopic entities of the underlying phenomena.
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Tenzun, Sherab; Won, Mihye ; Treagust, David F (2022)Science diagrams are an integral part of science because they are an important means of conveying and visualizing abstract science content (Kozma 2003). In recent years, researchers have demonstrated the educational ...
-
Liu, Yang (2012)This thesis comprises a series of inter-related studies that examined: (1) diagrams presented in commonly used biology textbooks in Western Australian schools; (2) teachers’ use of diagrams as part of their normal teaching ...
-
Harrison, Allan G. (1996)Chemistry textbooks and teachers frequently use a variety of metaphors, analogies and models to describe atomic and molecular structures and processes. While it is widely believed that multiple analogical models encourage ...