Students Using Graphs to Understand the Process of Cancer Treatment

Abstract

Scientists rely on graphs to make predictions, interpret data, and articulate arguments about the phenomena they investigate. Yet, students’ initial formal experiences with graphs are limited, and often restricted to their mathematics classes. We describe how we integrated graphs into a middle school science inquiry unit on cell biology. We report on findings from a classroom implementation with 30 middle school students. We describe students’ learning gains and characterize the kinds of graphs they generate in terms of the graphical and scientific understanding demonstrated. This study contributes an example of how curriculum can be designed to simultaneously support students’ science and graph understanding. It also demonstrates how graphs can be used as expressive tools that both limit and enable students’ explanations of complex scientific processes.