There is growing interest in the construct of "transduction", first introduced by (Kress, Cope and Kalantzis (eds), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures pp.153-161, Routledge, 2000), p. 159) to name how meanings in one mode are remade in another. Science educators now broadly agree that students need to…

Throughout the world scientific reasoning (SR) is a valuable and desirable ability to gain deeper understanding of science in all grade level. In the current study, we first adapted the SPR-I (7) which consists of seven items with three sub-dimensions as the experimentation, the understanding the nature of science (NOS) and the data…

This study focuses on the relationship between students' use of language resources and their conceptualisation of phenomena in producing scientific explanations in physics. The objectives are to find out if there is a general model that describe the meaning-making process, the extent that this model is applicable to various branches in physics.…

The advancement of technology has led to a growing interest in assessing scientific inquiry within digital platforms. This shift towards dynamic and interactive inquiry assessments enables researchers to investigate not only the accuracy of student responses ("product data") but also their steps and actions leading to those responses…

Literacy practices in science classrooms have been traditionally limited to the provision of macroscaffolds (writing templates like Question-Hypothesis-Methodology-Results). This paper explores the allowances and shortcomings of such practice by means of a systematic examination of a corpus of lab reports written by two small groups of college…

Chemical reasoning, and in particular structure--property reasoning, is an important goal of chemistry education. Johnstone's triangle (1982, 1991) is often used to explicate this type of reasoning. This triangle describes the multilevel thought chemical reasoning requires and shows why students find chemistry so difficult. However, this model…

This study examined student language in learning the human circulatory system, to understand the challenges they face in representing the knowledge in this topic. Data for this study comprised students' written responses to a range of structured test items. Responses to 17 test items from 70 students across four classes were analysed using tools…

Chemical thinking has been widely recognized as a core competence that students develop in chemistry education. This study examined the distribution and representation forms of chemical thinking in the five Chinese high school chemistry textbooks aligned with the new national standards in Mainland China. We employed the framework of essential…

While there has been much interest in the power of student-generated multiple representations to promote student reasoning and conceptual understanding, most studies of student explanations have been of written artefacts or only included diagrams as an adjunct to written explanations. This approach may be because teachers do not have an accessible…

The construction of dynamic multimedia products requires the selection and integration of a range of semiotic resources. As an assessment task for preservice teachers, this construction process is complex but has significant potential for learning. To investigate how weaving together multiple representations in such tasks enables learners to…

With the critical nature of socio-ecological challenges, the need to empower young people to generatively grapple with these science-related issues is crucial for developing their agentic citizenship. This paper reports on a primary science project that adopted a Socratic Seminar pedagogical strategy to enable student voice and collaborative…

In this research project we investigate the role of responses to anomalous data during modelling processes. Modelling is seen as a comprehensive practice that encompasses various aspects of scientific thinking; hence, it is an important style of scientific thinking, especially if analysed from a process-based perspective. Therefore, it provides…

Representational competence in science is the ability to generate external representations (e.g. equations, graphs) of real-world phenomena, transform between these representations, and use them in an integrated fashion. Difficulties in achieving representational competence are often considered central to difficulties in learning science.…

Many researchers have reported that bridging analogies can productively support students' scientific meaning-making. How this can be understood semiotically is, however, not well understood. This research followed an ethnographic case study approach to investigate Year 11 students meaning-making through a process of transduction (Kress, 2000;…

In this study, we developed machine learning algorithms to automatically score students' written arguments and then applied the cognitive diagnostic modeling (CDM) approach to examine students' cognitive patterns of scientific argumentation. We abstracted three types of skills (i.e., attributes) critical for successful argumentation practice:…