Examining How Activity Shapes Students' Interactions While Creating Representations in Early Elementary Science

Abstract

It is common practice in elementary science classrooms to have students create representations, such as drawings, as a way of exploring new content. While numerous studies suggest the benefits of representation in science, the majority focus on specific, canonical representations, such as graphs. Few offer insight or guidance regarding how teachers might effectively incorporate ad hoc, non-normative student-generated representations in their curricula. This study addresses this gap by detailing the relationship between two designed activities—one that supported more open-ended engagement with referents and the other that promoted a synthesis of referents—and the representational products that students generated as a result. We present data from a mixed age classroom (ages 6–9, N = 32) as students depicted their understanding of loggerhead sea turtles. Findings indicate that students performed better when working alone in the open condition and in collaborative dyads in the synthesize condition. These results suggest that it is necessary to unpack how mediating factors (such as students' cooperative strategies, facilitator feedback and materials used) align, to support or inhibit students' representational activities.

Keywords:

• Representations
• Science education
• Early elementary education
• Activity theory

Acknowledgments

We thank the Indiana University School of Education Proffitt Endowment for their support of this research. We also thank all of the teachers, parents, and students without whom this project would not have been possible. We also thank Alejandro Andrade-Lotero, David Phelps, and Johanna Keene for their support in collecting and analyzing these data.

Notes

1. Latour and others have called these products ‘inscriptions' to distinguish between material representations, such as conceptual representations in science and other literatures. While we remain focused on material representations, we maintain the use of this term because the science education scholarship continues to use the term representation.

2. While some activity theorists have used the term activity to refer to larger societal structures such as ‘schooling,' others have also found it productive to use activity theory to help identify those aspects of activity that individuals see as salient within a given task (Roth & Lee, 2007). Therefore, we contend that it is possible to attend to the features of activity that are relevant in these smaller timescales to support efforts at designing (Kaptelinin, 2005). Thus, the term activity refers to what others might refer to as a ‘task' in an effort to attend to the way that it is collectively organized by the participants.

3. Note that these criteria were collapsed because preliminary analyses suggested that they were linked to similar patterns in interaction.