Modern-day middle school science textbooks are heavily populated with colorful images, technical diagrams, and other forms of visual representations. These representations are commonly perceived by educators to be useful aids to support student learning of unfamiliar scientific ideas. However, as the number of representations in science textbooks has seemingly increased in recent decades, concerns have been voiced that many current of these representations are actually undermining instructional goals; they may be introducing substantial conceptual and interpretive difficulties for students. To date, very little empirical work has been done to examine how the representations used in instructional materials have changed, and what influences these changes exert on student understanding. Furthermore, there has also been limited attention given to the extent to which current representational-use routines in science classrooms may mitigate or limit interpretive difficulties. This dissertation seeks to do three things: First, it examines the nature of the relationship between published representations and students' reasoning about the natural world. Second, it considers the ways in which representations are used in textbooks and how that has changed over a span of five decades. Third, this dissertation provides an in-depth look into how middle school science classrooms naturally use these visual representations and what kinds of support are being provided. With respect to the three goals of this dissertation, three pools of data were collected and analyzed for this study. First, interview data was collected in which 32 middle school students interpreted and reasoned with a set of more and less problematic published textbook representations. Quantitative analyses of the interview data suggest that, counter to what has been anticipated in the literature, there were no significant differences in the conceptualizations of students in the different groups. An accompanying qualitative analysis probes further into why this was the case. In addition to the interview data, a corpus of graphic representations from 34 science textbooks (published between 1943-2005) was catalogued and examined for compositional trends and changes. This historical textbook analysis of images and illustrations reveals that, consistent with expectations, there has indeed been an overall increase in the number of representations in a given instructional unit. Yet, despite the increase, there is very little shift in the instructional functions that those representations serve. Where the most dramatic changes appear are with the individual representations themselves and how they are used to relate scientific ideas to middle school students. Finally, a set of video-recorded classroom observations with three different teachers was collected in order to study representational-use routines. A numerical analysis of classroom episodes suggests that it is fairly common for the majority of representations that are used to appear fleetingly and not be discussed again. When representations are reused or reintroduced, a qualitative analysis reveals that they are often accompanied by interpretive support from the teacher, which may steer students away from misinterpretations.

Last modified

• 10/02/2018

Creator

• Victor Lee

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2K44P

Subject

• Education and Social Policy - Learning Sciences

Keyword

• middle school
• textbooks
• Visual representations
• science education
• curriculum

Date created

• 2008-12-08

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright