Constructing Scientific Explanations for Chemical Phenomena through Drawings among 8th-grade Students

Abstract

The current study examines the progress of 8th-grade student drawings and written explanations of chemical phenomenon, subsequent to being involved in an instructional strategy that explicitly involves drawing as a supportive toll to construct scientific explanations. Additionally, the study examines the association between the representation of specific conceptual elements, such as structure, motion, and interactions, and the explanatory level of students' written explanations. These goals were addressed by comparing the students' collected drawings and explanations by applying the same open-ended question before and after the instructional strategy. Results show that after the instructional strategy significantly more students created more accurate drawings and drawings depicting more conceptual elements. Additionally, the students' written explanations significantly changed, progressing from descriptive accounts to discussions of specific underlying mechanisms at the submicroscopic level. Furthermore, the association between students' written explanations and drawings was stronger after the strategy. This study strengthens the argument for drawing interaction in explanation construction.

Students' mechanistic reasoning in practice: Enabling functions of drawing, gestures and talk

“…Accordingly, drawings created by the students for supporting the construction of mechanistic explanations should be analyzed from this perspective, that it is as a central element of the reasoning process. A large body of research in science education already focuses on drawing as a product of students' activity (e.g., Akaygun, 2016;De Andrade et al, 2021;Cooper et al, 2017), however, to our knowledge, only a few studies assumed drawing as part of the students' reasoning process (e.g., Parnafes, 2012;Tytler et al, 2020).…”

Change in students’ explanation of the shape of snowflakes after collaborative immersive virtual reality

“…In chemistry education, several studies have used studentgenerated diagrams to assess the level of students' conceptual understanding of key chemistry concepts. The concepts investigated included the particle theory of matter (e.g., Andrade et al, 2021;McLure et al, 2021a), atomic structure (e.g., Derman et al, 2019), and intermolecular forces (e.g., Cooper et al, 2015;Noyes and Cooper, 2019;Matovu et al, 2022b). In IVR research, however, few studies have used drawing tasks to assess students' science conceptual understanding.…”

Drawing as a Space for Social-Cognitive Interaction

“…The importance of drawing for the scientific practice [1] and the growing recognition of drawing as a powerful tool to learn science [2][3][4] have recently inspired a number of studies in science education as well as in different content domains and learning-teaching environments. Drawing facilitates conceptual change and the development of more complex mental models [5][6][7] as it enhances students' visualization of ideas and concepts during the exploration of scientific models [8,9]. It also enables students to process ideas, move toward higher levels of thinking, understand more complex topics, and develop more complex explanations [6,10].…”

“…Drawing facilitates conceptual change and the development of more complex mental models [5][6][7] as it enhances students' visualization of ideas and concepts during the exploration of scientific models [8,9]. It also enables students to process ideas, move toward higher levels of thinking, understand more complex topics, and develop more complex explanations [6,10]. Importantly, when students create their own drawings, they become highly engaged with learning [2,11].…”

“…Thus, having students creating their own drawings is typically associated with a better understanding than when students learn from visual representations they have been given [3,12]. In particular, collaboratively created drawings provide opportunities for students to integrate multiple representations, exchange and clarify ideas, engage in elaborative discussion, build on each other's ideas, and establish shared representation and deeper science understandings [6,10,11,13,14]. Thus, collaborative drawings have affordances that emerge from both visual representation and the collaborative discourse around drawings' creation.…”