Drawings Count: Using Drawings to Assess Students’ Developing Understandings of Quantified Complex Systems

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Artistry in STEM: Creative Approaches to Complex Systems and Scientific Understanding (Table 8)

Abstract

This study investigates student-generated drawings as a tool for assessing students’ learning about dynamic equilibrium in cellular physiology. Through a pretest-posttest design, 30 undergraduate students’ drawings were analyzed to determine how students represent the mechanisms that produce dynamic equilibrium. Students’ drawings of cellular sub-systems during initial and final were assessed, revealing conceptual progress in students’ accuracy at depicting dynamic equilibrium. The findings suggest that students were able to extract quantitative information from a dynamic computational simulation to improve the scientific accuracy of their drawings. These findings underscore the potential of drawing assessments to determine how students understand quantified complex systems.

Authors

• Ganrong Fu, University of Wisconsin–Madison

• Matthew E. Lira, University of Iowa