Equal possibilities for students to communicate in the science classroom is of great importance for democratic reasons. Many students, especially multilingual ones, have difficulties to communicate in the language of instruction in school. A multiplicity of modes of expression can therefore be of great help, both for understanding the subject content one’s supposed to learn and for communicating one’s knowledge in an assessment situation. The purpose of this thesis is to study how students can show their knowledge in science through drawings instead of written text. Another purpose is to study how certain models for these drawings can help teachers to evaluate the students’ knowledge in an assessment situation. The study was conducted in a grade 5 in a city in the south of Sweden. The teacher had just finished teaching a section in science about the content ‘the bloodstream and breathing’. Models were used to design an intervention in form of an assessment basis based on pictures. The students were also asked to draw their answers. The students’ answers and an interview with the teacher conducted after the intervention were the empirical material. Because it is an action research study the teacher takes part in the design of the assessment basis and gets the opportunity to reflect on the result of the evaluation. Through the study two theoretical frameworks are used, multimodal discourse and didactic design. Multimodal discourse is used to design the assessment basis and didactic design is used to analyze the students’ answers and the teacher’s reflection after the intervention. The result shows that students’ knowledge can be visualized at several levels through drawings. The used models also enables students to show more knowledge than planned in the teacher’s design and even visualize misconceptions some students have. In the interview the teacher reflects on the models’ potential and comes to the conclusion that it is possible to evaluate students’ knowledge through drawings. Another reflection concerns the misconceptions shown in the students’ answers, and that it is a good thing for the teacher to be aware of in future designs in science. One part of the result shows that drawings generally might get a lower value than written texts in an assessment situation. In some answers from the intervention the drawings show more knowledge in forms of details than a written text can do. One of the conclusions is that the richest assessment basis would be a combination of different modes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-52874 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Wirstedt, Anna |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Institutionen för skolutveckling och ledarskap (SOL) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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