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22. MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE ACROSS MODES AND
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When students wish to express something, they also need to make a number of choices, for example, which are the most apt modes that are available to them (see e.g., Kress, 2010), what is the “frame” that creates “the boundaries to interpretation” (Kress, 2013, p. 73), and what should be foregrounded and what should be backgrounded (Kress et al., 1998).
3 Research methods
The empirical setting for the study is a science project about climate changes involving 25 upper secondary school students (aged 15-16) and their teacher. The main data material consists of 10 hours of video recordings of teacher-led whole class settings and student interaction during group work. The study used a design based research methodology where teachers and researchers cooperated in designing the teaching, drawing on the design principles presented in Tytler et al. (2013). Three groups used head mounted cameras. In order to explicate and display what can be seen as emerging patterns in students’ development of conceptual understanding while interacting with visual representations, detailed analyses of one student groups’ interaction trajectory is presented in the results section, and compared in brief to the other two groups wearing head cameras.
4 Results
Table 1 presents the trajectory of key events in the development of the group’s drawings to explain the greenhouse effect. In addition to student drawings, key interventions from the teacher are included as key representations. The table also indicates the modes involved, and the additional resources that the students used. A “key representation” we take to differ from “additional resources” by having a constitutive role in the situation.
Table 1. Key events in the students’ sense making of the greenhouse effect.
Event Key representations (including talk) Action Modes Resources
1 Ole starts by
browsing through the textbook. 1st Drawing:
beakers and light source.
Writes explanatory text.
Drawing and writing.
Textbook and experiment.
2 Teacher talk pointing out that it is important that the drawing is clear, that this is only the first draft, and that the students should expect to revise it.
Teacher whole-class interaction
Talk
3 Ole starts on
2nd drawing below the first. Knut asks why, and Ole answers
“Now I am going to include concepts and stuff”.
Drawing and writing.
Students’
earlier drawing.
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4 The students
read off the temperature in the two beakers and comment on the heat from the light source.
Experimental setup, gestures, talk
5 Student discussion about absorption and reflection of light, referring to drawing.
Peer discussion
Talk, gestures Student drawing
6 Ole looks at
the group behind him, says: “They draw so big, we so small.
Starts 3rd drawing on the back of the paper.
Drawing Previous drawings on back side, textbook.
7 The teacher pointing out that they should focus on what goes on inside the beakers, and make a drawing that explains the process to someone who doesn’t know.
Teacher whole-class interaction
Talk
8 The teacher approaching the group and discussing how to differentiate between short-wave radiation from the sun and long-wave radiation from the ground;
how to represent waves and how it is done in the textbook? Asks the students to work on details on what happens to the radiation.
Teacher interacting with Knut and Ole
Talk, gestures, pointing on specific aspects of drawing
Student drawing, teacher talk, gestures (points to drawing)
9 Knut draws
the dyad’s 4th and final representa-tion. They discuss intensively different types of radiation during design.
Drawing, talk, gestures
Student drawing, teacher’s explanation (referred to)
The sequence of key events presented in Table 1 develops towards a focus on what goes on inside the beakers. This can be seen in the following ways: (1) labelled arrows are introduced in the student drawings (Event 3), (2) the beakers are drawn larger in the final drawing (Event 6), and (3) the beakers are partly overwritten. A significant shift has thus taken place in what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded. There is also a development in terms of framing: Initially, the piece of paper frames the
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drawn beakers (Event 1), then the beakers become the framing for the processes that take place inside them (Event 6).
Although we present in detail our findings from a group that we found particularly interesting, other groups showed similar patterns.
4 Discussion and conclusion
Our analysis shows that the students’ representations developed from a naturalistic depiction of the situation to the presentation of invisible and theoretical aspects of the scientific model both within and across modes. In essence, the radiation waves and their interaction with CO2 were foregrounded in the drawing. The development of the students’ work shows that authoritative sources (such as the textbook and the teacher) and the students’ experience of the experiment setup were interconnected through their drawings. By their sustained inquiry, drawings became increasingly “layered” in the sense that they first related to the experiment only (e.g. the beakers), and developed through relating also to the results of the experiments (e.g. temperature labels), and then ended up as including also the invisible, physical processes inside the beakers.
Educational implications that we see stemming from our results include that teachers should be persistent in guiding the students in what to focus on in their discussions, and how concepts and phenomena should best be represented.
5 References
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Fredlund, T., Airey, J., & Linder, C. (2012). Exploring the role of physics representations: an illustrative example from students sharing knowledge about refraction. Eur. J. Phys., 33(3), 657-666.
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Tytler, R., Prain, V., Hubber, P., & Waldrip, B. (Eds.). (2013). Constructing Representations to Learn in Science. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
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