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Evaluation of fifth-grade students’ understanding of heat transfer through multimodal representations (Bachelor thesis)

Καραλή, Χριστίνα/ Karali, Christina

This undergraduate dissertation falls within the field of Science Education and focuses on evaluating fifth-grade primary school students’ understanding of heat transfer by conduction and convection through the analysis of their multimodal representations. Its purpose was to investigate the ideas expressed in students’ drawings and how these ideas changed before, during, and after the implementation of a Teaching–Learning Sequence (TLS). The semiotic resources and levels of representation used by the students were also examined. The dissertation consists of a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part presents the scientific content of heat and heat-transfer mechanisms, students’ alternative conceptions, the basic principles of multimodality and the social semiotic approach, as well as students’ drawings as a means of learning and investigating understanding. In the empirical part, the drawings of 18 students were analysed. These drawings were produced in response to three tasks included in a written questionnaire: one task on conduction and two tasks on convection. Data were collected at five time points: before the TLS, at two points during its implementation, immediately after its completion, and ten months later. The results showed that the initial representations were mainly based on macroscopic features and alternative conceptions. During and immediately after the instruction, more complex representations emerged, including thermal and particle-level differentiation and more frequent depictions of movement. However, a complete microscopic explanation of conduction and a complete causal explanation of convection remained difficult, while some initial ideas reappeared in the delayed measurement. The students mainly used colour, arrows, lines, particulate elements, and verbal labels. After the beginning of the TLS, mixed representations combining the sensory and unseen substance levels (SS+US) emerged. Nevertheless, the presence of particles or the use of multiple semiotic resources did not always ensure scientifically adequate understanding. A central finding of the study is that representational enrichment does not necessarily correspond to greater scientific adequacy. Overall, the findings highlight the contribution of students’ drawings to investigating understanding of thermal phenomena.