Diagnosing Student Misconceptions: Using Drawings as a Research Method

In recent years there has been considerable interest in misconceptions held by students of science. There are several ways for obtaining information about student's knowledge. Individual interviews, open-ended questions and/or two -tier multiple-choice on specific science topics may effectively elicit students' in-depth thinking, but they are difficult to quantify and some times subjective. Drawings have been considered as simple research instruments that enable easy comparisons at the international level. This study aims to investigate the effect of drawing method on determining university students' misconceptions concerning photosynthesis and respiration in plants. Data gathered from drawings of 156 students aged 20-25 from four classes and interview of 15 students. These drawings are analyzed and categorized into model types corresponding to five levels of understanding. Several misconceptions were found, some of them with both relationship between photosynthesis and respiration in plants and food and nutrition of plants. Some of these misconceptions were similarly previous studies and distributed across all age classes. Drawing method in conjunction with interviews have been successfully used to diagnose student's conceptual understandings and misconceptions about abstract concepts, e.g. 'photosynthesis and respiration'.

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