The Role of Visual Representations Within the Scientific Practice of Explanation

Abstract

Two Grade 5/6 classes (n=47) participated in an 8-week biology unit where they investigated WallCology, a digital ecosystem. During a series of oral presentations, students presented findings from their digital experiments. Our goal is to understand the role of the visual representations (e.g., digital screens, graphs) that students referenced during these presentations. We use the Claim Evidence Reasoning framework to establish the suitability of the presentation task for scientific explanations and for evaluating students’ explanations. We show that student groups were proficient in their scientific explanations and effectively used a variety of representation types across all three components of their explanations. We conclude that visual representations did not just influence scientific discourse, but were part of it.