Understanding the meanings secondary biology students construct around science through drawings

Abstract

Learning science, more now than ever, has become a critical part of becoming a fully educated person: engaging in science has become an ever more necessary component for engaged citizenship and career success (Carson, 1997; Feinstein, 2011; Osborne & Dillon, 2008). Yet students often see science as an endeavor for someone else, contributing to a lack of access to necessary knowledge and practices (Aikenhead, 1996; Costa, 1995); in other words, science often lacks meaning for these students. Understanding and recognizing the meanings of science that students construct and the ways that they relate to science are an important task for educational research to encourage authentic and useful engagements with science learning (Archer et al., 2010; Calabrese Barton et al., 2012).