Students' mechanistic reasoning in practice

Enabling functions of drawing, gestures and talk

Bibliographic Data

ID21392646
AuthorsVanessa de Andrade (0000-0001-9031-7770, Instituto de Educação, Universidade de Lisboa, Alameda da universidade Lisboa Lisboa Portugal, corresponding author), Yael Shwartz (0000-0002-5145-3486, Department of Science Teaching Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot Israel), Sérgio Freire (0000-0002-9394-9738, Instituto de Educação, Universidade de Lisboa, Alameda da universidade Lisboa Lisboa Portugal), Marlyse Baptista (0000-0003-1609-5764, Instituto de Educação, Universidade de Lisboa, Alameda da universidade Lisboa Lisboa Portugal)
Year2022
Volume106
Issue1
Pages199-225
Publication date2022-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0036-8326 • E-ISSN: 1098-237X
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/sce.21685
OpenAlexW3206654781
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited52

Mechanistic reasoning is a powerful form of reasoning central to scientific explanations. Despite mechanistic reasoning being an important dimension of scientific practice and a central dimension of science curricula, students face difficulties in developing such type of reasoning. Many authors have been proposing tools for supporting its development; drawing is one such tool. Studies that purposefully explore how drawing leverages and supports students' mechanistic reasoning while engage in a process of constructing explanations are still scarce. The goal of the current study was to understand how students' mechanistic reasoning emerges and is enacted when students are jointly involved in drawing creation. For that, we drew on a recent framework that identifies essential characteristics of students' mechanistic reasoning and also on theories of distributed and embodied cognition. In this paper, we present a pair of middle school students who jointly explain a chemical phenomenon by creating drawings and reasoning with them. Using a fine‐grain analysis we examined the elements of students' mechanistic reasoning in relation to drawing creation and how talk and embodied actions on and with the drawings were used to support students' reasoning. Findings reveal that drawings played a key role in paving the way for students reasoning about mechanisms and in enacting mechanistic reasoning. In particular, drawings were essential for pushing students to look for a mechanism, for enabling and supporting mechanistic reasoning‐in‐action, and for facilitating productive interactions between the students that ended up in the construction of a sophisticated mechanistic explanation

Action (physics) · Cognition · Cognitive science · Curriculum · Deductive reasoning · Dimension (graph theory) · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Mathematics education · Mechanism (biology) · Pedagogy · Process (computing) · Qualitative reasoning · Spatial intelligence · Action Observation and Synchronization · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Innovative Teaching and Learning Methods · Psychology · Science Education and Pedagogy