Why do Plants Wilt? Investigating Students’ Understanding of Water Balance in Plants with External Representations at the Macroscopic and Submicroscopic Levels
Gregor Torkar 1, Manja Veldin 2, Saša Aleksej Glažar 1, Anja Podlesek 3 *
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1 University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Education, Department of Biology, Chemistry and Home Economics, Ljubljana, SLOVENIA2 The Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana, SLOVENIA3 University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Department of Psychology, Ljubljana, SLOVENIA* Corresponding Author

Abstract

In order to understand water balance in plants, students must understand the relation between external representations at the macroscopic, microscopic, and submicroscopic levels. This study investigated how Slovenian students (N = 79) at the primary, secondary, and undergraduate tertiary levels understand water balance in plants. The science problem consisted of a text describing the setting, visualizations of the process occurring in a wilted plant stem, and five tasks. To determine students’ visual attention to the various elements of the tasks, we used eye tracking and focused on the total fixation duration in particular areas of interest. As expected, primary school students showed less knowledge and understanding of the process than the secondary school and university students did. Students with correct answers spent less time observing the biological phenomena displayed at the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels than those with incorrect answers, and more often provided responses that combined the macro-, micro-, and submicroscopic levels of thought. Learning about difficult scientific topics, such as the water balance in plants, with representations at the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels can be either helpful or confusing for learners, depending on their expertise in using multiple external representations, which is important to consider in biology and science education.

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

EURASIA J Math Sci Tech Ed, Volume 14, Issue 6, June 2018, 2265-2276

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejmste/87119

Publication date: 21 Mar 2018

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