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Title
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Diagrammic literacy in secondary science education
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Author
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Abstract
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| Students in secondary science education seem to have difficulties with understanding diagrams. The present study focused on explanatory factors that predict students difficulties with process diagrams, i.e., diagrams that describe a process consisting of components that are related by arrows. From 18 compulsory national Biology exams of secondary school pre-university students, all process diagram tasks (n = 64) were included in corpus. Features of the task, student, and diagram were related to the difficulty of that particular task, indicated by the cohort mean exam score. A hierarchical regression analysis showed main effects for (1) the cognitive task demand, (2) the familiarity of the components, and (3) the number of components in a diagram. All these main effects were in the expected direction. We also observed interactions. Within the category of tasks with a high cognitive demand, tasks about a diagram of which students have low prior content knowledge were more difficult than tasks about a diagram of which students have high prior content knowledge. Tasks with a high cognitive demand about a diagram with familiar arrows were, surprisingly, more difficult than tasks with a high cognitive demand about a diagram with unfamiliar arrows. This latter finding might be attributed to compensation for task difficulty by the large number of components in the diagrams involved. The final model explained 46 % of the variance in exam scores. These results suggest that students have difficulties (1) with tasks that require a deeper understanding when the content is new, (2) with diagrams that use unfamiliar component conventions, and (3) with diagrams that have a small number of components and are therefore probably more abstract. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Research in science education. - Place of publication unknown
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Publication
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Place of publication unknown
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2013
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ISSN
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0157-244X
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DOI
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10.1007/S11165-012-9331-0
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Volume/pages
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43
:5
(2013)
, p. 1785-1800
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ISI
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000324551800004
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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