Abstract
Reasoning about graphical representations representing dynamic data (e.g., distance changing over time), including interpreting, creating, changing, combining, and comparing graphs, can be considered a domain-specific operationalization of the general twenty-first century skills of creative, critical thinking and solving problems. This paper addresses the issue of how these 21st century skills of interpreting and creating graphs can be supported in a six-lesson teaching sequence about graphing motion. In this teaching sequence, we focused on the potential of an embodied learning environment to facilitate the development of primary school students’ reasoning about motion graphs by having primary school students (9–11 years) ‘walk’ graphs in front of a motion sensor to generate distance-time graphs. We asked: How does students’ reasoning about graphing motion develop over a six-lesson teaching sequence within an embodied learning environment? Based on the collected data, we examined changes in students’ level of reasoning on graph interpretation and graph construction tasks using a repeated measurement design. Additionally, we present two teaching episodes showing instances of how perceptual-motor experiences during the lessons aided students’ reasoning about graphical representations of motion. Results show that students went from iconic understanding towards understanding in which they reasoned based on one or two variables when interpreting and constructing graphical representations of motion events. At these higher levels of reasoning these students showed understanding of modelling motion in line with the intended 21st century skills of generating, refining, and evaluating graphs.
Highlights
Twenty-first century competences include the need for equipping students with an integrated set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, for example being creative, innovative, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.The Netherlands and communicative
To elicit students’ reasoning about motion graphs, we developed an embodied learning environment consisting of a six-lesson teaching sequence
We provide an in-depth analysis of how the embodied learning environment might have supported the students in their ability to generate, refine, and reason about graphical representations of motion
Summary
Graph sense can be considered as representing a way of thinking, rather than as a specific set of rules and skills that can be transmitted to others (Friel et al 2001) Such graph sense includes the interpretation or construction of graphs and the ability to distinguish between discrete and continuous representations. We focus on graphs representing the bivariate relationship of distance changing over time In such graphs, varying the scale of the graph changes the shape of the graphically represented motion, which offers opportunities for students to reason about the relationship between the represented variables and the (qualitative) understanding of slope (e.g., Nemirovsky et al 2013; Zaslavsky et al 2002). Graph interpretation on a global scale implies “looking at the entire graph (or parts of it) and gaining meaning about the relationship between the two variables and, in particular, their pattern of co-variation” (Leinhardt et al 1990, p. 11), whereas graph construction implies the visualization of a certain relationship as representing shapes of trends on the graphs’ axes (Matuk et al 2019)
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