Changing semiotic modes indicates the introduction of new elements in children’s reasoning (original) (raw)
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Analyzing individual, semi-structured interviews of 41 preschoolers (age 4-6) in a pre- posttest research design, an attempt was made to investigate whether the change in the use of children’s semiotic modes indicates the introduction of new elements to their thinking. For many children changing in semiotic modes indicates enhancement in their reasoning. Furthermore, in many cases the modalities regarding human body and drawing are more meaningful compared to children’s speech.
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Constructing explanations of scientific phenomena is a high-leverage practice that promotes student understanding. In the context of this study, we acknowledge that children are used to receiving explanations from teachers. However, they are rarely encouraged to construct explanations about the causes and consequences of phenomena. We modified a strategy to elicit and analyze primary students’ reasoning based on scientific theory as a methodological advance in learning and cognition. The participants were fourth-graders of middle socioeconomic status in Chile’s geographical zone with high seismic risk. They drew explanations about the causes and consequences of earthquakes during a learning unit of eighteen hours oriented toward explanation-construction based on the Tectonic Plates Theory. A constant comparative method was applied to analyze drawings and characterize students’ reasoning used in pictorial representations, following the first coding step of the qualitative Grounded Th...
Review of Science, Mathematics and ICT Education, 2020
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COMPARISON OF DEPICTIONS BY MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS ELICITED IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS
In J. R. Dakers, W. J. Dow and M. J. de Vries (Eds), Teaching and Learning Technological Literacy in the Classroom: Pupils' Attitudes Towards Technology (PATT 18) Conference, 2007
Drawings are important in design and are a major part of technological activity. This paper presents analysis of drawings produced by Indian middle school students in different contexts: while designing in a D&T task, translating textual information to depiction, and while depicting the solution to a problem stated in text. The tasks included drawing of simple and complex, static and dynamic objects. In all tasks students used exploratory sketches and several strategies to translate their ideas of 3-D objects on to paper (2-D): perspectives, graphical symbols (lines, circles, etc), selective abstraction, X-ray drawings, etc. Depictions of assembly had more annotations than depictions of static and assembled objects themselves. Explorations in the design context were more than in any other context. There is a need for incorporating activities in school curricula, which can enrich students' drawing and visualisation skills. The findings suggest that design and technology education units could encourage such activities. DRAWINGS IN TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION As part of our everyday activities, we manipulate and maintain technological objects. This offers scope for visualisation of relations between structures of artefacts and their functions. We refer to artefacts in our interactions using verbal and non-verbal communication modes, which may include talking and gesturing, verbal descriptions, reading and making drawings. Such communication and thinking with drawings and pictures has been an essential strand in the intellectual history of human development in general and technological development in particular (Ferguson, 1977). Visualization and externalization of objects We often understand the diverse objects around us through our knowledge about their spatial and functional distinctions from other objects. It is known that expressing ideas in a visuospatial medium, such as drawings, photographs, models, etc., makes comprehension and inference easier than in a more abstract medium such as language (Tversky, 2002). Drawings aid in the development of reasoning and problem solving skills, and cut across disciplines. Drawings are preferred over textual representations for externalising and sharing of ideas among designers, architects and engineers. Whereas text is serial in nature, drawings explicitly preserve information about object geometry and topology (Ullman, Wood and Craig, 1990). Besides, they can be used to convey the dynamics of objects and their assemblies (Hegarty, 2004). Literature reveals that adults use sketches and drawings as an aid to thinking (Suwa and Tversky, 1997; Scrivener, Ball and Tseng, 2000). Designers have been noted to make sketches that are tentative, vague and incomplete (exploratory sketches). For children, drawings are a spontaneous form of expression (Ramadas, 1990). Like designers, students also use drawings to think, visualize and reflect on their ideas, especially when engaged in problem-solving (de Bono, 1972) and design (MacDonald and Gustafson, 2004; Hope, 2000). Preliminary design ideas are explored by students through sketches. Sketches give us insight into the strategies used by students to visualize and manipulate their ideas of objects and assemblies in different tasks. Anning (1997) has emphasized
Drawings, Gestures and Discourses: A Case Study with Kindergarten Students Discovering Lego Bricks
2018
This chapter presents a study aimed at investigating the didactic potentiality of the use of an artefact, useful to construct mathematical meanings concerning the coordination of different points of view, in the observation of a real object/toy. In our view, the process of meaning construction can be fostered by the use of adequate artefacts, but it requires a teaching/learning model that explicitly takes care of the evolution of meanings, from those personal, emerging through the activities, to the mathematical ones, aims of the teaching intervention. The main hypothesis of this study is that the alternation between different semiotic systems, graphical system, verbal system and system of gestures can determine the evolution of the learning objectives that are the coordination of different points of view. The Theory of Semiotic Mediation offers the theoretical framework suitable to design the teaching sequence and to analyse the collected data. The study involved 15 Kindergarten st...
Peeking into students’ mental imagery: the Report Aloud technique in Science Education research
Ciência & Educação (Bauru), 2019
The goal of this article is to present a qualitative methodological proposal for researching Science teaching. We produced the article based on premises of the Think-Aloud method and Depictive Gesture Analysis. Here, we report on the structuring of the Think-Aloud technique, a novelty within the scope of research in education and applications in the teaching of Chemistry and Physics. The main advantages of this approach is its potential to establish a link between verbal and body language, which is produced by the participants during data production through the dialogues proposed within this research. Therefore, the procedures in the study allow for a more accurate analysis because of the pieces of evidence obtained from speaking, writing, and the gestures for the identification of mental images formed by the students about the scientific concepts they have studied.