Using visual, embodied, and language representations to teach the 5E instructional model of inquiry science

Abstract

Helping students to use and interpret representations in science is critically important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourses related to understanding scientific issues. The purpose of this case-study is to report on how one Year 5 teacher in a small, city school in Brisbane, Australia used different visual, embodied, and language representations to capture students’ engagement in the inquiry tasks. While the case study showed that the students demonstrated clear understandings of the relationships between the different scientific phenomena they were investigating, there is no evidence that these ways of thinking and talking generalised to other inquiry-science topics.However, the case study does provide insights into how this teacher used different visual, embodied, and language strategies to help the students in his class develop complex understandings of the inquiry-science unit they were studying.