Why do Plants Wilt? Investigating Students’ Understanding of Water Balance in Plants with External Representations at the Macroscopic and Submicroscopic Levels

Abstract

In order to understand water balance in plants, students must understand the relation between external representations at the macroscopic, microscopic, and submicroscopic levels. This study investigated how Slovenian students (N = 79) at the primary, secondary, and undergraduate tertiary levels understand water balance in plants. The science problem consisted of a text describing the setting, visualizations of the process occurring in a wilted plant stem, and five tasks. To determine students' visual attention to the various elements of the tasks, we used eye tracking and focused on the total fixation duration in particular areas of interest. As expected, primary school students showed less knowledge and understanding of the process than the secondary school and university students did. Students with correct answers spent less time observing the biological phenomena displayed at the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels than those with incorrect answers, and more often provided responses that combined the macro-, micro-, and submicroscopic levels of thought. Learning about difficult scientific topics, such as the water balance in plants, with representations at the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels can be either helpful or confusing for learners, depending on their expertise in using multiple external representations, which is important to consider in biology and science education.

The impact of students’ educational background, interest in learning, formal reasoning and visualisation abilities on gas context-based exercises achievements with submicro-animations

“…A similar study was conducted by Torkar et al (2018) on the understanding of the relation between external representations at the macroscopic, microscopic, and submicroscopic levels on the example of water balance in plants. In their study, the eye-tracking results show that students with correct answers spent less time observing the biological phenomena displayed at the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels than those with incorrect answers did.…”

“…Several studies have been conducted using eye-tracking technology in different fields, for example, to examine how students process text, data diagrams, relevant photographs, explanatory keys, SMRs etc. (Slykhuis et al, 2005;Mason et al, 2013;Havanki and VandenPlas, 2014;Ho et al, 2014;Ferk Savec et al, 2016;Yen and Yang, 2016;Torkar et al, 2018). More concretely, Havanki and VandenPlas (2014) present eye tracking as a tool that has been recently applied in chemistry education research.…”

“…The screen-based EyeLink 1000 (35 mm lens, horizontal orientation) eye tracker apparatus and associated software (Experiment Builder for the preparation of the experiment and a connection with EyeLink; Data Viewer for obtaining the data and basic analysis) for recordings and analyses of students' eye movement when solving context-based exercises was used. Data were collected from the right eye (monocular data collection that followed corneal reflection and pupil responses) at 500 Hz (Torkar et al, 2018).…”

Students’ Achievements in Solving Authentic Tasks with 3D Dynamic Sub-Microscopic Animations About Specific States of Water and their Transition

“…Data were collected from the right eye (monocular data collection following corneal reflection and student responses) at 500 Hz. 49 The data were collected using the eye-tracking method in the laboratory of the Department of Psychology, of the Faculty of Arts, of the University of Ljubljana. The data collection was performed between November 2017 and January 2018.…”