Revealing students’ intuitive ideas through Drawings: Insights for Technology-Driven Instructional Designs

Drawings have been a valuable pedagogical tool for science educators. While drawings have been used for analyzing students’ conceptual understanding and evaluating their level of expertise, they have not been fully explored to understand students’ implicit ways of thinking(knowledge that students’ use but are not aware of) when they create scientific explanations. Previous studies have suggested how drawings can act as a window into students’ ideas that are not captured in their verbal explanations, however this has been given limited attention. This research aims to bridge this gap by investigating students’ drawings to uncover implicit elements in their understanding of scientific concepts. The study analyzed drawings by thirtyfive grade eleven students, depicting their understanding of the heat transfer phenomenon. The diverse range of elements in students’ drawings reflected the activation of various implicit ideas like perceived notions of matter interactions, agentic views of vapors, changing ideas about transfer processes, and how they influenced their conceptual understanding of heat transfer concepts. The findings provide insights on the type of scaffolds that students need such as prompts and tools enabling students to consider various elements or modify the structure of important elements to enhance their scientific understanding. This study has implications for technology-based instructional design.