CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEORY BUILDING

Over the past three years, the researcher had opportunities to present the findings of these studies to national conferences both of the science education research community and the education community. The appended list (see Appendix 4) documents the conference presentations and proceedings.

8.4.1 THE INSTRUCTIONAL USAGE OF DIAGRAMS IN BIOLOGICAL TEACHING AND LEARNING

As mentioned above, the research findings from chapter 5 encouraged the researcher to consider the pedagogical use of visual representations in science teaching and learning. Diagrams are ubiquitous in science education and depict important tools for learning and reasoning about structures, processes, and relationships. The analysis of the diagrammatic distributions and the trends across lower and upper secondary general textbooks may provide some important insights on the understanding of how scientific content knowledge is presented to secondary students, by means of this particular mode of representation. Meanwhile, consideration of this diagrammatic distribution as a view of the representational nature of diagrams and appropriate pedagogy can help inform the instructional routines in which teachers organize their teaching of conceptual knowledge. Rather than viewing diagrammatic teaching as a fixed means of demonstrating content information, it could be viewed as a process of more scientifically engaging a series of instructional practices. Teacher’s scientific instructional use of diagrams may have a role to play in not only solving students’ problem and difficulties of viewing various biological phenomena directly, but also eliminating the difficulty of interpreting and relating multiple levels of

representations toward acquiring scientific understandings (Gilbert & Treagust, 2009). In addition, three major scales were identified in the instrument regarding biology teachers’ need to consider how and when diagrams are integrated in the teaching: Instruction with Diagrams, Assessment with Diagrams, and Students’ Diagrammatic Competence.

8.4.2 THE FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DIAGRAM AND TEXT The conceptual framework for considering students’ learning with multiple representations was discussed in the chapter 2. This multiple representation learning framework integrates research on cognitive science of representation and constructivist theories of education. It also proposes that the effectiveness of multiple representations can best be understood by considering three fundamental aspects of learning: the design parameters that are unique to learning with multiple representations, the functions that multiple representations sever in supporting learning, and the cognitive tasks that must be undertaken by a learner interacting with representations (Ainsworth, 2006). This study extended the usage of the multiple representations framework to the analysis of learners’ learning of biological concepts when static and non-simulated representations are engaged in comparison with computer simulations. It is suggested that diagram and text differ in their roles as students process the domain knowledge. The three key cognitive functions of learners’ learning with a combination of diagram and text in secondary biology are to constrain, complement and construct.

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