Biology Diagrams: Tools to Think With

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In an effort to characterize critical components of conceptual understanding in the domain of biology, particularly those that may be important to the design of biology instruction, I have been conducting research on individuals' understanding of and reasoning about subcellular biological processes. In this article I report the results of videotaped individual think-aloud interview sessions with is participants who varied in their degree of formal training in genetics that focused on the spontaneous generation and use of domain-specific diagrams during reasoning about the process of meiosis. The more advanced of the 15 participants displayed knowledge-dependent representational variability, fine-tuned their diagrams to the immediate reasoning task, and systematically used their fine-tuned diagrams as "tools to think with" while reasoning. These results suggest that more advanced pictorial skills and conceptual knowledge coevolve or mutually influence one another in the development of understanding of a subcellular biological process. Major implications of this research arc twofold. With regard to biology education, the results support and provide guidelines for the design of instruction that explicitly deals with the development of currently neglected pictorial skills. In a broader scope, these results provide a detailed empirical account of the role played by diagrams in scientific reasoning.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: