Primary Pupils’ Multimodal Representations in Worksheets—Text Work in Science Education

Abstract

Worksheets are common in science classrooms with an aim to support pupils’ meaning-making, e.g., for guiding them in performing hands-on activities and documenting their experiences of such activities. Yet, there have been few systematic studies of pupils’ disciplinary representations in worksheets. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, we have analyzed fifth grade pupils’ (age 10–11) multimodal texts in worksheets (n = 25) when they were working with shadow formation as part of their regular classroom activities. In the worksheets they were asked to first explain in writing why or why not a shadow was formed and then explain shadow formation through a drawing. At an overall level, we found that a majority of the pupils managed to express in writing why a shadow is formed, though it appeared to be more challenging for them to explain why a shadow is not formed. In their drawings, quite a few pupils managed to include several key aspects of shadow formation, at least when combining image with writing. For all tasks, the explanatory parts of the pupils’ responses were often implicit. Based on our results, we suggest that pupils may benefit from teaching practices that integrate a parallel focus on form and content as a way to raise their awareness of, for instance, the affordances of different resources and how explanations can be structured. Such practices may support pupils to be able to consider and choose appropriate resources in their disciplinary texts.

Representations of science content in a primary classroom: Combining long and short timescales for multimodal analysis

“…It is possible that they function as a kind of “stand in” for a person lifting the kettlebell rather than representing an upward force. Ellie's way of drawing arrows supports the result from a previous study within the same project (Jeppsson et al, 2022), suggesting that students would benefit from explicit teaching in how to represent content through different modes.…”

“…Based on these results, they concluded that students need to develop a metalevel of understanding concerning representations, and that representations should be regarded as a mediating tool to communicate and analyze ideas. Similarly, in a study focusing on how worksheets function as a resource for students' meaning-making about shadow formation, we concluded that students might need support in how to use and combine different forms of representations, such as words, images, and arrows (Jeppsson et al, 2022).…”

“…Hence, in science classrooms, students need to move between and among representations, and to integrate different resources to a meaningful whole (Danielsson, 2016;Lemke, 1998). Likewise, when articulating their ideas about science phenomena and to reason about them, students need to use a variety of resources, for instance, to make drawings (e.g., Jeppsson et al, 2022;Sjøberg et al, 2022;Tytler et al, 2013Tytler et al, , 2020Wanselin et al, 2023). Furthermore, in particular, young pupils can leverage their everyday ways of sense making as valuable resources for making meaning of science content (e.g., Siry & Lang, 2010;Siry et al, 2012).…”

Meaning-Making in Ecology Education: Analysis of Students’ Multimodal Texts

“…What research has been undertaken (see, for instance, [38]), suggests that as students create multimodal texts to describe and explain scientific phenomena, this has considerable potential to enhance their meaning-making. Furthermore, such texts can also be used by teachers to assess students' views of scientific phenomena [13,39,40], another aspect that this study seeks to explore.…”

As transições epistêmicas e multimodais na produção de representações sobre os estados de agregação da matéria em aulas de química

“…A questão da linguagem no ensino de Ciências é principalmente fundamentada nas interações discursivas (MEHAN, 1979;LEMKE, 1990;AGUIAR, 2006) e nas interações multimodais TANG;YEO, 2011; XU; VAN DRIEL;HEALY, 2021;JEPPSSON et al, 2022). A linguagem não é apenas um sistema de transmissão de ideias, mas pode ser compreendida como uma mediação em uma relação dialética com o pensamento (VIGOTSKI, 2001).…”