Abstract
In order to understand water balance in plants, students must understand the relation between external representations at the macroscopic, microscopic, and submicroscopic levels. This study investigated how Slovenian students (N = 79) at the primary, secondary, and undergraduate tertiary levels understand water balance in plants. The science problem consisted of a text describing the setting, visualizations of the process occurring in a wilted plant stem, and five tasks. To determine students’ visual attention to the various elements of the tasks, we used eye tracking and focused on the total fixation duration in particular areas of interest. As expected, primary school students showed less knowledge and understanding of the process than the secondary school and university students did. Students with correct answers spent less time observing the biological phenomena displayed at the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels than those with incorrect answers, and more often provided responses that combined the macro-, micro-, and submicroscopic levels of thought. Learning about difficult scientific topics, such as the water balance in plants, with representations at the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels can be either helpful or confusing for learners, depending on their expertise in using multiple external representations, which is important to consider in biology and science education.
Highlights
In order to understand basic biology concepts, it is important for students to develop an understanding of the transport of materials across cell membranes
Even though there was an overall increase of percent correct with educational level as expected, the result of Fisher’s exact test did not reach statistical significance for Task 1, asking about the causes of the plant wilting, nor for Task 4, which required students to choose the correct visualization of the process of osmosis
In Task 5, which required the students to give the reasons for choosing a specific animated visualization of the process of osmosis, the accuracy of the three groups was statistically significantly different as well, with primary school students less accurate than secondary school and university students
Summary
In order to understand basic biology concepts, it is important for students to develop an understanding of the transport of materials across cell membranes. Diffusion is the primary method of short-distance transport in cells and cellular systems It is defined as the random, thermal movement of molecules in which a net flow of matter moves along a concentration gradient, i.e., from an area of higher concentration toward an area of lower concentration (Sperelakis, 2012). Osmosis is used to explain water uptake by plants, turgor pressure in plants, water balance in aquatic creatures, and transport in living organisms. It is the flow of a solvent across a semipermeable membrane from a region of lower to higher solute concentration (Sperelakis, 2012)
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