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Study scientific reasoning in collaborative drawing: a wide approach on cognition

Vanessa de Andrade, Centro Investigação e Inovação em Educação, ESE-IPP

 

Drawing to learn in science has received increased attention in recent years. However, research on drawing in science education has focused mainly on its representational features, with less attention to the process of drawing creation itself and its role in guiding and shaping students' reasoning. This presentation will focus on this last aspect, exploring students' scientific reasoning in collaborative drawing using the lens of wide cognition. The term wide cognition means an approach to cognition that goes beyond the traditional view of cognition as intramental (affected by external inputs and responding with outputs), drawing attention to wide factors, which encompasses accounts of cognitive processes as embodied, embedded, enactive, distributed and situated. Taking the lens of a wide cognition perspective to study the processes of students' reasoning in collaborative drawing means understanding drawing as a space of action and for actions where discovery and understanding emerge in the complex interaction between the drawers and the drawing. This presentation aims to explore how the structure of collaborative drawing enables a wide cognitive system that supports students' scientific reasoning. In addition, a model for understanding drawing as a wide cognitive system is proposed. In this presentation, I will present an analytical framework that is used in a multimodal microanalysis of a segment of a pair of students who jointly attempted to make sense of and explain a chemical phenomenon by co-creating a drawing and reasoning through it. I will use this segment as an example to show how participant students' reasoning occurs in a cognitive system, which is distributed between the two students and the drawing, embodied through the use of gestures, situated in a material environment that likely constraints and helps reasoning, and enacted through the dynamic coordination between the two students. Based on this analysis, I will propose a model to understand drawing as a wide cognitive. I will conclude with some of the implications of understanding drawing a wide cognitive system that is not restricted to the cognitive activity of externalising thought on paper.

 

Keywords: collaborative drawing; scientific reasoning; embodied cognition; distributed cognition; multimodal micro-analysis


Biography

Vanessa de Andrade is a researcher in Science Education. She holds a Licentiate degree in Chemistry and a Master's in Chemistry and Physics Teaching from the University of Lisbon. She completed her doctoral studies at the same university, specialising in Science Education. She has published in the fields of science education, visual scientific explanations, reasoning through collaborative drawing, embodied and distributed cognition, and multimodality. Her current interests revolve around the intellectual and material interaction occurring through drawing. Vanessa de Andrade is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centro Investigação e Inovação em Educação of the Instituto Politécnico do Porto.