This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing…

The use of group drawing to promote student-generated representation is a common instructional strategy as it combines the benefits of using visual representation and collaborative talk. Although the affordances of group drawing have increasingly been emphasized in science education, few studies have investigated how drawing as a visual mode…

Worksheets are common in science classrooms with an aim to support pupils' meaning-making, e.g., for guiding them in performing hands-on activities and documenting their experiences of such activities. Yet, there have been few systematic studies of pupils' disciplinary representations in worksheets. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, we…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the process of students' construction of scientific explanations through drawing explanatory diagrams. For this, we observed fifth and sixth graders' drawing processes in a gifted science class involving learning physics concepts in mechanics. The analysis was carried out on three pictorial…

This article presents the development, description, application, and discussion of an analytical framework to examine students' drawings of scientific concepts and processes. Student-generated representation, particularly drawing, is increasingly emphasised as an important learning strategy to help students reason, explain, and demonstrate their…

Student-generated drawing is a useful strategy to construct students' scientific ideas. For exploring ways to support student-generated drawing, we focused on the perspective of 'Norms' -- shared behaviour patterns desirable in a community. We investigated what norms were formed and how they emerged when students made drawings to explain…

The visual mode provides emergent bi/multilinguals an essential resource to construct scientific explanations. Yet, while a metalanguage is used to describe the written mode of scientific language such as, claim, evidence, reason; there is little research that makes students aware of the metalanguage of a visual mode. We propose an introduction to…