Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes the effect of the compulsory and specific instruction on the human circulatory system representations in secondary and university students.We found differences according to the specific biological instruction. SECONDARY AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HUMAN CIRCULATORY SYSTEMABSTRACT There is no agreement about the robustness of intuitive representations of the circulatory system and their susceptibility to change by instruction.In this paper,we analyze to what extent students with different kinds of biology instruction and age have been able to change their intuitive into scientific representation of the human circulatory system. We analyzed two aspects of the circulatory system representation: the models of the circulatory system (the relationship between heart-lung in the blood pathway) and the circulatory system pattern (the blood pathway between organs). Regarding the models of circulatory system, we found differences in the distribution of the groups according to the specific biological instruction. The majority of participants had an incomplete model, which did not include the lungs while the Health Science adolescents group had a scientific representation. As for the circulatory system pattern, we did not find differences between groups. However, we cannot conclude that the two aspect of the circulatory system representation (model and pattern) are independent. The data in this study show that compulsory Human Physiology instruction did not enhance the acquisition of a scientific representation of the human circulatory system.

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The aim of this study is to analyse how graphicacy is promoted through activities with images of the human body in third to sixth year primary school textbooks from three different publishers. The analysis was based on categories related to type of image, type of task, procedures, cognitive processing level required and whether there are explicit instructions on how to use the image. The results show that illustrations and visual diagrams are the most frequent images. The main task is image interpretation, whereas production tasks are scarce. Moreover, the tasks are not evenly distributed among the different procedures. The processing level required is low and requires superficial processing of the images, resulting in a learning process based on copy and repetition. There is some evidence of activities being sequenced according to educational level. We conclude that the kind of graphicacy found in the textbook activities is insufficient for acquiring competence in the use of images.

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