Including visual representations within senior high school biology assessment: considerations of grammatical complexity
Date
2023
Authors
Fenwick, L.
Unsworth, L.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Journal article
Citation
Curriculum Journal, 2023; 34(3):412-436
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
DOI
Abstract
This paper analyses the opportunities for presenting knowledge that are created when assessment allows senior high school biology students to draw on linguistic and visual resources when constructing meaning in response to short-answer examination-style questions requiring a sequential explanation. Students within one senior high school biology class were given the opportunity to respond to an examination-style question through both written and visual representations. Analysis of the student responses for high and middle-achieving students, from a systemic functional linguistics perspective, indicates that high-achieving students use a broader range of grammatical forms more often than middle-achieving students to present key understandings of classification and composition within both written and visual representations. Including opportunities within assessment for students to express knowledge through written and visual representations allows for students to elaborate within their short-answer responses and to construct the broader range of representations that is valued within the discipline, but explicit guidance is required to support all students to make use of the complex grammatical patterns within written and visual representation. For senior high school biology students to be successful in the final stages of schooling, explicitness about the complex grammars of visual and written representations is required within curriculum and pedagogy.
School/Discipline
Dissertation Note
Provenance
Description
Data source: Supplementary material, https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.181
Access Status
Rights
Copyright 2022 The Authors. The Curriculum Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)