Students’ Metaphors for Science

As I noted in Chap. 6 , while coding of student responses to the open-ended questions given at both the beginning and end of the course regarding students’ thoughts about scientific processes and products, I started to notice patterns in their use of metaphor within the responses. Importantly, considering students’ use of metaphor actually opens a metaphoric window into their thinking, so I also document those occurrences of metaphor in my coding process. For instance, a student might say that observations are the foundation of science knowledge. In this case, I would identify the excerpt with the Science knowledge is evidence-based code, and also Science knowledge is an edifice (metaphor) code. This chapter will explore only the metaphorical analysis of the data, after which I link this interpretation to the interpretations from the open coding that I presented in Chap. 6 .