Kindergarten and first-grade students' representational practices while creating storyboards of Honeybees collecting nectar

A productive approach to studying the role of representations in supporting students’ learning of science content is to examine their representational practices. The current study examines kindergarten and first-grade students’ representational practices in a similar context—the creation of storyboards—both before and after a curricular intervention in order to highlight those aspects of their practices that changed while engaging in a superficially similar task. Analysis of the students’ storyboards reveals considerable improvement after the intervention. Analysis of the students’ practices as they changed over time is also presented by examining the students’ interactions, with a focus on their discussions of the science content and the representations themselves. There is no doubt that students’ ability to create representations such as drawings and graphs is central to their ability to learn science in school (DiSessa, 2004; DiSessa, Hammer, Sherin, & Kolpakowski, 1991; Lehrer & Schauble, 2006). One reason for the centrality of representations in science classrooms is that specific representational forms can help students more easily engage with and communicate complex ideas (Roth & McGinn, 1998). For this reason, representations are also instrumental in the work of professional scientists (Latour, 1988; Lynch, 1988), and thus many attempts to teach students how to engage in authentic science necessarily include helping them to create representations. After all, students do not always create representations that are immediately productive for learning and expressing science content. Rather, students need support in order to create productive and accurate representations regardless of whether they are being asked to create canonical representations (i.e., graphs) or invented representations (i.e., drawings or diagrams from observation). One method that has been used to examine the way that the students’ context can support their creation of representations is to study students’ representational practices as they engage in creating and refining representations in science class. The practice approach highlights the relationship between students’ representational actions, their knowledge of the content, and the features of the context that enable and constrain those actions (Danish & Enyedy, 2007; Hall, 1996; Roth & McGinn, 1998). Prior examinations of students’ representational actions from a practice perspective have proven effective in several accounts of how representational practices contribute to or explain student learning within science and math (c.f., Cobb, Stephan, McClain, & Gravemeijer, 2001; Danish & Enyedy, 2007; Hall, 1996; Hall & Rubin, 1998; Roth & McGinn, 1998). However, there are two key gaps in the current literature that this paper aims to fill. First, examinations of students’ representational practices typically focus on the way that these practices change in different contexts. This is, in part, to examine how students’ movement through a range of representational activities supports them in learning new content. While this is a fruitful approach, it does not allow for a systematic comparison of students’ practices as they change over time with respect to a single representational form. Second, this literature largely overlooks the representational practices of early elementary school children (for some exceptions see Danish & Enyedy, 2007; Lehrer & Schauble, 2000). Rather than neglecting the representational practices of young children, we argue that they are a crucial population to study because the practices that students develop early in their school careers will be important in supporting their later science and representational activities. Moreover, early elementary students spend a great deal of time learning by drawing, sculpting, and enacting their ideas in science class, and so it behooves us as a field to better understand these processes in order to inform research and teaching with representations. This paper aims to begin filling these gaps in the literature by documenting the representational practices of 42 kindergarten and first-grade students in service of learning how honeybees collect nectar. The students were asked to create storyboards at two points in time: before and after a curricular intervention where they learned about honeybee content and were also encouraged to request and provide representational feedback (for the larger study upon which this analysis draws see Danish, 2009a; Danish, 2009b). First, to ground our discussion of the students’ representational choices, we present a brief analysis of their representations (the storyboards) to highlight the fact that these did in fact improve over the course of the study. Then, video of students’ interactions were analyzed to document the students’ representational practices by identifying what their discourse revealed regarding the issues that they saw relevant in their representational practices. Specifically, their talk was coded along multiple dimensions to identify the prevalence and circumstance of talk about the science content and the representations themselves. Representational Practices ICLS 2010 • Volume 1