Sequential patterns of students’ drawing in constructing scientific explanations: focusing on the interplay among three levels of pictorial representation

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate the process of students’ construction of scientific explanations through drawing explanatory diagrams. For this, we observed fifth and sixth graders’ drawing processes in a gifted science class involving learning physics concepts in mechanics. The analysis was carried out on three pictorial representational levels: sensory (e.g. observed materials), unseen substance (e.g. molecules) and unseen non-substance (e.g. forces). We found that there were five patterns of interplay depending on the sequential path through the pictorial representational levels. All students began drawing explanatory diagrams from the sensory level as the first step and then constructed explanations using the unseen levels based on the interplay among different levels. In the process of forming meaningful relationships among the three levels of representation, students focused on a specific phenomenon through drawing at a sensory level and extended their making sense of the phenomenon from what happened to why it happened. Based on these findings, we suggest how teachers can use the interplay among the different pictorial representational levels to guide students in generating scientific explanations through drawing.

KEYWORDS:

• Student-generated drawing
• scientific explanation
• pictorial representation
• interplay

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Acknowledgements

We wish to express our gratitude to the students and the teacher who collaborated in this study. We also acknowledge and thank Felicity McLure, Jennie Tan, and Richard Jugar for their continued assistance and encouragement in the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Joonhyeong Park http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5296-9396

Jina Chang http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5618-3510

Kok-Sing Tang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2764-539X

David F. Treagust http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5340-0970

Mihye Won http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8771-7626

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP180100143 ‘Drawing science diagrams to enhance students' scientific creativity.’