Analysis of science textbook pictures about energy and pupils' readings of them

This article outlines the findings of the part of the 'Science Teacher Training in an Information Society' (STTIS) project concerned with describing the possible difficulties pupils have when 'reading' science textbook pictures about energy. Six documents were selected on the basis that they had some of the textual/graphical features previously identified by the project as potentially presenting difficulties to pupils. The pupils' readings of these were investigated using a questionnaire and a follow-up interview. The analysis of three of the documents and of 12 pupils' readings of them is reported in this paper. The results confirm the hypothesis that the 'reading' of science textbook pictures is not at all trivial for pupils, and conclude that teachers need to spend time and effort talking through the meaning of the images with them. They also suggest that the list of textual/graphical features used in this research is a good starting point for this kind of critical examination.