Do student perceptions of teaching predict the development of representational competence and biological knowledge?

Sandra Nitz,Shaaron E Ainsworth,Claudia Nerdel,Helmut Prechtl

doi:10.1016/j.learninstruc.2013.12.003

Abstract

Dealing with representations is a crucial skill for students and such representational competence is essential for learning science. This study analysed the relationship between representational competence and content knowledge, student perceptions of teaching practices concerning the use of different representations, and their impact on students' outcome over a teaching unit. Participants were 931 students in 51 secondary school classes. Representational competence and content knowledge were interactively related. Representational aspects were only moderately included in teaching and students did not develop rich representational competence although content knowledge increased significantly. Multilevel regression showed that student perceptions of interpreting and constructing visual-graphical representations and active social construction of knowledge predicted students' outcome at class level, whereas the individually perceived amount of terms and use of symbolic representations influenced the students' achievement at individual level. Methodological and practical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the development of representational competence in classrooms.

Highlights

One goal of science education is to enable students to participate in decision-making and public debate regarding scientific issues
We focused all of our work within the same teaching unit on photosynthesis in biology education as we analyse students’ content knowledge (CK) in line with Kozma & Russell’s (2005) argument that the development of Representational Competence (RC) is dependent on the context
4 Results First, we examine the relationship of students’ RC and CK and present results regarding the change over the time of the teaching unit and the variation among classes

Summary

Introduction

One goal of science education is to enable students to participate in decision-making and public debate regarding scientific issues. Science is instead a multimodal discourse utilising a variety of representations (e.g., graphs, diagrams, symbols, formulae) and so interpreting, constructing, transforming, and evaluating different scientific representations are crucial skills for students to build and communicate a conceptual understanding of science (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001; Lemke, 2004; Yore & Hand, 2010). These skills have been referred to as representational competence (RC, Kozma, Chin, Russell, & Marx, 2000; Kozma & Russell, 1997, 2005) and contribute to being scientific literate. Scientific literacy comprises of the interacting dimensions of fundamental literacy, including the abilities to construct and interpret scientific discourses (inter alia RC), and the derived understanding about the principles and foundations of science (Norris & Phillips, 2003; Yore et al, 2007)

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