Multimodal discourse of chemistry and meaningful learning of propositions

Abstract

This is an exploratory study presenting the content analysis of chemistry students’ replies to problem questions in which information is presented as a linguistic representation accompanied by schematic diagrams (De). “De’s are a type of pictorial representation that promote the recovery of macroscopic information which can be related to an experimental fact. Replying correctly to the question requires the student to learn propositions in which different signs must be combined to construct a complex meaning that allows the referent to be described using new concepts. The replies were subjected to content analysis. Analytic categories were created in order to identify the students’ preferred discourse. The preliminary results indicate the students’ found it difficult to acquire significant propositional learning since they did not manage to describe the referent in conceptual terms, and what predominates in their discourse is descriptions of the De’s superficial characteristics. This does not allow them to make key connections with theory and thus makes it difficult for them to solve the problems.

Keywords

• schematic diagrams
• reading
• pictorial representation