"Can you put something on paper that shows what you know about air and how the linked syringes work?"
Below are drawings that 5th graders produced in the interview sessions. Each sheet contains what the student drew during the 30-minute session. They were asked to think about why pressing one syringe made other syringe move, and how we were able to compress the air in the syringes by pressing both syringes at the same time.
Please use the comment feature below to write what you think they were trying to show. What ideas about air? What kinds of relationships? And how did they use physical artifacts to represent these ideas?
On each students drawing, you will see a box where they tried to show air. This was a specific task that I asked them to do - how could you show me there was air in this box?
(clicking on each picture gets you a larger version)
Hi Brian, a few comments.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I'm missing some context in order to be able to "read" the drawings. What was exactly going on, what were the children seeing, bieng told and saying? In what order did they draw the different drawings on the shhet, and from what point they began each drawing? Did they stop or interrupt (to think, since they found an obstacle, etc.) at some point? Was their drawing fluid and quick or effortful?
I also suggest you add a procedure and a subjects space in the web page (how many subjects, who were they?)
However, a few ideas. Esach child´s pictorial prpduction (that is, all what they produced on the sheet) according to some dimensions.
Dimension 1: Intervening representational systems. Categories:
1.1. Figurative drawings or icons exclusively (Student 1)
The following categories include other rep systems together with drawing:
1.2. Writing (Students 1 and 4)
1.3. Writing and schemes (as arrows) (Student 2)
In the case of 1 and 2:
What are the functions of these other systems in representing the situation?
(ex: In the case of Student 4, the word “Air” is used to constrain or make a quite open pictorial representation more clear, it is what Barthes (1964) called linguistic anchor. Same for “up” and “down” (Student 1). Instead, the arrow Student 2 uses in his picture at the right above adds an information that is not conveyed pictorially (direction), in this sense there is a relation of complementarity. But his (or her) other arrows are highliting the pictorial component a llinguistic production refers to, within an anchoring function).
Dimension 2: Representation of the syringe. Categories might account for all its components and record which are specifically and inequivocally conveyed.
Dimension 3: Representation of Movement. Categories?
Dimension 4: Representation of the invisible. Categories?
Bye
Nora