Cognitive resources drawn from different STEM disciplines for interpreting a titration experiment logistic graph: a case study of student thinking
摘要
Graphs are productive tools for communication and sensemaking in STEM, making graphical interpretation a crucial skill for STEM learning and professional work. However, during interpretation, novice students draw on a myriad of cognitive resources - past experiences, knowledge, and strategies - some of which may not be relevant to the context or may be based on intuitive ideas or heuristics. This study explores the research question: how may intuitive or learned resources have helped or hindered one student interpret a covarying graph within introductory chemistry? Of 16 student participants in a task-based, semi-structured interview, Aubrey (pseudonym) was the only student who fluidly activated knowledge from biology, mathematics, and chemistry as she made sense of strong acid-strong base titration curve. We showcase how Aubrey visually chunked the graph, associating intuitive and learned ideas with each chunk, and explore how those ideas may have helped and/or hindered her chemical interpretation of the graph as well as her ability to make sense of change along the curve. Aubrey demonstrates that students’ resources for graphical interpretation are an amalgam of what they see and experience across an interdisciplinary landscape. This raises questions about how different instructional approaches foreground or obscure particular features of graphs and how we might better support students in coordinating insights from multiple domains to reason about covarying quantities. Using Aubrey, we argue that it may be valuable to engage students with graphs in introductory science courses from a more mathematical perspective.