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Our research program is concerned with the trajectory of individuals from their initial participation in science-related activities to their full participation in scientific research. This study was designed to provide answers to questions about (a) the practices required for reading graphs in high school textbooks and scientific journals, and (b) the role of high school textbooks in the appropriation of authentic scientific graph-related practices. For our analyses, we selected five leading ecology-related journals and six representative high school biology textbooks. Although there were no differences in the total number of inscriptions used in journals and textbooks, there were significant differences in the frequency with which Cartesian graphs were used. To allow more detailed analyses, an ontology of graphs was developed. Our fine-grained analyses based on this ontology yielded qualitative differences between the uses of graphs and associated captions and main text as they appeared in high school textbooks and scientific journals. Scientific journals provided more resources to facilitate graph reading and more elaborate descriptions and interpretations of graphs than the high school textbooks. Implications of this study are outlined as they relate to (a) producing graphs, captions, and main text in high school textbooks; and (b) teaching and researching graph-related practices from anthropological perspectives. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 977-1019, 1999 What counts in particular disciplinary contexts as convincing arguments or persuasive results is inexorably tied to the practical devices through which phenomena become accountable. (Lynch, 1995, p. 255, emphasis in the original) Over the past decade, there have been an increasing number of studies documenting the pivotal roles and functions of representation practices in science (e.g., Knorr-Cetina & Amann, 1990;Latour, 1993;Lynch, 1995; Lynch & Woolgar, 1990). Following Latour (1987), representations other than text are called "inscriptions." They first appear in scientific laboratories JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 36, NO. 9, PP. 977-1019(1999 © and field sites, and-after having been cleaned, superposed, transformed-are later used in scientific publications. Inscriptions include readings from simple devices, recordings from automated devices, computer screen output, photographs, micrographs, data tables, graphs, and equations. The more information an inscription summarizes, the more it becomes complex, resistant to deconstruction, and powerful (Latour, 1987). Despite the centrality of representation practices in science, relatively little work has been done in science education from either sociological or psychological perspectives. Consequently, the way inscriptions are used in science education is typically not informed by a deep understanding and sound theory of cognition (Lowe, 1993;Schnotz, 1993) or representation practices (Roth & McGinn, 1997).Practices related to graphing are quintessential to s...

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Using graphs is a key social practice of professional science. As part of a research program that investigates the development of graphing practices from elementary school to professional science activities, this study was designed to investigate similarities and differences in graph-related interpretations between scientists and college students engaged in collective graph interpretation. Forty-five students in a second-year university ecology course and four scientists participated in the study. Guided by domainspecific concerns, scientists' graph-related activities were characterized by a large number of experiencebased, domain-specific interpretive resources and practices. Students' group based activities were characterized by the lack of linguistic distinctions (between scientific terms) which led to ambiguities in group negotiations; there was also a lack of knowledge about specific organism populations which helped field ecologists construct meaning. Many students learned to provide correct answers to specific graphing questions but did not come to make linguistic distinctions or increase their knowledge of specific populations. In the absence of concerns other than to do well in the course, students did not appear to develop any general interpretive skills for graphs, but learned instead to apply the professor's interpretation. This is problematic because, as we have demonstrated, there are widely differing viable interpretations of the graph. Suggestions for changes in learning environments for graphing that should alleviate this problem are made. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 1020-1043 Laboratory studies point to the generation and interpretation of inscriptions (e.g., graphs, tables, diagrams) as the central activity of scientists (Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Lynch, 1985). Graphs are probably the most important of scientists' ways of presenting their data because they pictorially illustrate the relationships between different measured variables in, for instance, scatter plots (Bastide, 1990;Lemke, 1998). Schank (1994) listed graphing-which by definition included producing, reading, and critiquing graphs-as one of the seven most important skills of a professional biologist. Learning to produce, read, and critique graphs should therefore be an important ingredient of any university biology program. However, there is evidence that even college graduates with B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees by and large have not developed much competence in using graphs in contexts where scientists employ them by default (Roth, McGinn, & Bowen, 1998). JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 36, NO. 9, PP. 1020 -1043 © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-4308/99/091020-24Correspondence to: G. M. BowenStudents' deficiencies in graphing have been researched largely from an information-processing paradigm (Leinhardt, Zaslavsky, & Stein, 1990). Research from this perspective shows that few students arrive at the normative interpretations of graphs that researchers hold as referents for student-generated sol...

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